TWiT 284/Transcript

Transcript

Leo Laporte
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This is TWiT, this WEEK in TECH, Episode 284 recorded Sunday, January 16, 2011; Dónde está Leo's Grave?

This WEEK in TECH is brought to you by Ford, introducing the all new 2012 Ford Focus Electric with voice-activated sync and MyFord Touch, featuring gas-free power, zero CO2 emissions and battery management technology that lets you go the distance, learn more at focuselectricpower.com. And by audible.com. Sign up for the platinum plan and get two free books, go to audible.com/twit2 and don’t forget to follow audible on Twitter, user ID audible_com.

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Leo Laporte
So Dwight, I should call you.

Dwight Silverman
Yes.

Leo Laporte
So Dwight, you are now not no longer outnumbered because on this show we have from Austin, Texas, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Brian Brushwood.

Brian Brushwood
Texas represents – that’s right.

Leo Laporte
…on this show from Jacksonville, Florida from the panhandle which is the deepest south you could get Mrs. Gina Smith.

Dwight Silverman
I was born in Jacksonville, Florida.

Gina Smith
Well I was born in Daytona Beach, but I live in San Francisco to be clear.

Leo Laporte
Well it depends on how much [indiscernible] (2:40) weighs, at -- so…

Dwight Silverman
I’m doing a – I’m doing what you were doing Leo, I’m trying to lose weight, and using Twitter to do it. I set up an account called 50PoundsByJune and that’s my goal. And I’m trying to lose 50 pounds, I tweet my weight every day and sometimes while I’m eating and kind of the struggles, or trying to find the food I want and it’s working. I’m losing weight.

Leo Laporte
Really?

Dwight Silverman
Oh, yeah. Make it Twitter, keep you honest.

Brian Brushwood
How many so far?

Dwight Silverman
I’ve lost, I’ve lost four pounds, I stared Monday, I’ve lost four pounds; I’ve a goal of two pounds a week, through the end of June.

Brian Brushwood
Public accountability is one of the most powerful tricks, psychological tricks, you can use for that. They’ve done experiments where they make the people the shame.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah. Well, it’s that social proof, you want to be consistent with what you’ve said in the past and if you do it in public you know that kind of pledge really works.

Leo Laporte
I got to say, I have to say though that there are so many fatties now, looking to be shamed on Twitter, there is no longer much shame left.

Leo Laporte
We talked a little bit before this show but I think I should mention that Gina has never been on TWiT before, not through any faults of mine, I’ve been trying to get her on the show since 2005, she is my old friend, my co-host from radio, my co-author, my first book, my co-host of my first TV show, former NBC – I’m sorry, ABC technology correspondent, former CEO of NIC Computing, author of iWoz, Steve Wozniak’s autobiography, co-author I guess I should say. And currently she is starting up BYTE Magazine, BYTE.com.

Brian Brushwood
That’s so huge, I feel so small.

Gina Smith
Reincarnating that old lady.

Leo Laporte
She is a witch of the first order, Gina Smith, so good to see you again. I missed you at CES. We missed each other, we’ve – it’s just been ages.

Gina Smith
How it’s been ages? You know you and I hosted a radio show together. We saw each other every Sunday for so many years and my life has been – well, there’s been a vacuum in my life.

Leo Laporte
Oh dear!

Gina Smith
[indiscernible] (4:53).

Leo Laporte
…and now – and so it begin.

Gina Smith
…and now it feel – and now I feel fulfilled.

Leo Laporte
Good, well it’s so good…

Gina Smith
So thanks for having me on the show.

Leo Laporte
Thank you for being on, and I think in your capacity as Editor-in-Chief of BYTE Magazine, I hope you come back more and maybe we should talk about a BYTE podcast because that would be fun. Maybe you and Jerry and John, we could just do a BYTE show, it would be really fun.

Brian Brushwood
Would there be a section on the podcast where they just say out loud all the lines to a basic program for you to type in at home?

Leo Laporte
10, go to 20. That would be fun.

Gina Smith
That would be [multiple speakers] hilarious (5:30)

Leo Laporte
I used to – that was Compute! Magazine, it would always have those basic codes.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah I remember I used to get, I think it was Enter Magazine. It was basically the kid’s version that eventually got folded into 3-to-1 contact. I mean I remember my parents spent hours and hours typing in…

Leo Laporte
Such a pain in the ass.

Brian Brushwood
But it was so rewarding and those were the magic days man. You had an incredible gizmo that you could program and then going in there and changing little things, so the word such as [indiscernible] (5:53) the end. I had to say you suck, it was awesome.

Leo Laporte
Right. But let me ask you because I was talking to Richard Hart who you all know, he hosted The Next Step and before that CNET Television and I –

Gina Smith
I hosted a show with Richard Hart on CNET.

Leo Laporte
Well there you go.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
And he’s now teaching television production at the Academy of Art in San Francisco and I said, oh that must be great Richard, I saw him at ShowStoppers [indiscernible] (6:17) that must be great. You get to talk to the kids who are really into technology, really understanding. He said, you know you’d be surprised. Kids today – they don’t have to wonder that we had growing up, they never typed in any basic code. They don’t see technology as something unusual or exciting or magical. For them it’s common place and so they don’t have the same deep understanding that we had to have.

Brian Brushwood
I don’t know, I think we get the…

Gina Smith
And they don’t want it.

Brian Brushwood
…same wonder for playing with the technology, for doing – I mean you see that – I mean just done something as rudimentary as YouTube. People really enjoy trying to…

Leo Laporte
Well it’s different, isn’t it?

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
They instead of knowing a command line or how to format a disk, they know how to edit video.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, exactly. They know how to tell complicated stories. They know how to give – write these tutorials for each other. For them it’s like – it’s the wonder of like, holy crap I got 30,000 people checking out my shooting a gun tutorial, and then that – I mean how advanced is that over, you know 10 go to 20 from back in our day.

Gina Smith
Well Brian this is such a, really excellent point because I guess in our generation where we were doing this, we were talking about you know the technology and the newer generation who was giving trophies whether or not they were on the team or not. Was always told you’re great, you’re great, you won even if you lost. This generation coming up, it’s all about me you know. I mean, meaning it’s all about them. So the most interesting thing for them is that I want a – I want a fan page.

Leo Laporte
That’s true. It’s them, videos of them.

Brian Brushwood
That’s a good point too. In our day, you could win a regional trophy for you T-Ball skills. Nowadays if you want to tell a story on the Internet, you are competing with the entire globe.

Leo Laporte
Because there is a talking orange who could whip your butt.

Gina Smith
I know I could whip mine.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess. I guess here’s my question. There’s always been a percentage of people, interested in this stuff, I just and so there certainly are still kids who know how to format a hard drive and they all listen to this show so they’re mad as hell at me for saying that right now. And I’m sure that there is --

Gina Smith
[multiple speakers] (8:14)

Leo Laporte
…there’s plenty of kids out there who are deeply interested and enthusiastic about technology but I just wonder if the percentage is different. I wonder if – I mean, really if you grow up with this stuff, we weren’t – you know there was no wonder in the television set for our – for us.

Brian Brushwood
Exactly!

Leo Laporte
So we didn’t get so excited about it as I’m sure my parents did.

Dwight Silverman
Except I think there’s always a group of people who want to know how it works.

Leo Laporte
There’s always going to be that.

Dwight Silverman
They want to dive in. Right.

Leo Laporte
There’s always going to be that.

Dwight Silverman
They want to dive in, they want to figure out how it works and those who are the ones who end up making it work better later.

Leo Laporte
Right, and thank goodness because if that weren’t the case, it’d be Idiocracy, we’d be all sitting here with technology, nobody knew how to use or fix or improve.

Dwight Silverman
Well there’s that too.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Brian Brushwood
And I think it’s…

Dwight Silverman
That’s here too.

Brian Brushwood
I think it’s important also to acknowledge the difference between the dumbing down of society and the segmentated – the fragmentation more of our knowledge base, right?

Leo Laporte
It’s more fragmented.

Brian Brushwood
There are kids out there who don’t know how to de-frag a hard drive but they are experiencing the joy of having written their own app for the app store.

Leo Laporte
Right, that’s true.

Brian Brushwood
You know, they don’t understand proper maintenance of their computer but they – and that’s something I’ll never get around to doing.

Gina Smith
Yeah but I’ll – but I’ll tell you something just to add to this and back to memory lane Leo. You and I were once in a hotel room and we had never seen the web before. Some guy came to our hotel room in Vegas and said here is the first web page on the Internet because before that there was no web. You and I looked at each other and said should we buy up all the web names? No that wouldn’t be…

Leo Laporte
Oh, wasn’t that stupid of us? We sat here. We could have bought sex.com, we could have bought tv.com.

Gina Smith
All of it, we decided not to because it wouldn’t be ethical as a journalist. Ethics [multiple speakers] (9:54).

Leo Laporte
What the hell?

Dwight Silverman
Ethics messed

Leo Laporte
This is – this show was ended up being a saga of missed opportunities. We were talking before the show began about how both Gina and I got off with 10,000 shares of ZEE-NET’s stock for ten grand when we first consulted for them. And there was only to guys doing it and we both said nah…

Gina Smith
And we took the money instead of the stock.

Leo Laporte
Actually that was the last time I listened to Dvorak, that’s when he is getting mad. They’ve never gone anywhere. They are history.

Gina Smith
Me too. I don’t listen to him as a rule now as a result of that.

Leo Laporte
On the day that Apple went public.

Gina Smith
He also said that the same thing when Apple stock dived.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Gina Smith
Don’t buy Apple stock, the Apple is dead.

Dwight Silverman
On the day that Apple went public I bought 10 shares and kept it for like three or four years and at one point shortly after they went public, it started to go down, I think I bought it, it was like 25 and it went down to like 21 and 19 and I thought I better get rid of this turkey. And I did – and I went back and looked the other day…

Leo Laporte
Apple could never really – I mean [indiscernible] (10:56) came in what did you lose? They couldn’t have possibly gone over $35, could it?

Dwight Silverman
No. Well, it didn’t, but if I had held on to it…

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
It was the worst…

Leo Laporte
I was kidding obviously.

Dwight Silverman
I won’t be sitting here talking to you, let’s put it that way.

Brian Brushwood
I see, as long as they get some money. You are too good for Leo Laporte. All right I got you.

Leo Laporte
Oh excuse me, so you’re only in it for the money.

Dwight Silverman
It’s not because of you, I was in it for the money.

Leo Laporte
Boy are you on the wrong show?

Dwight Silverman
Yes.

Leo Laporte
Holly cow!

Gina Smith
Holly cow!

Leo Laporte
He is in it for the money folks. Actually this show you are not in it for the money because I have no idea what the commercials are. And my entire staff is in New York City. So, no commercials, I am announcing. It’s a commercial free TWiT. And I apparently I got the number wrong too. Is it 284?

Brian Brushwood
That’s what the doc says. Could be a hold over. Although, you know what, actually I am looking at the doc, well it jumps from 284 to 282 to 279. So I have no idea.

Leo Laporte
I don’t know what’s going on. Let’s talk about tech. It’s funny we all were at CES.

Brian Brushwood
Yes.

Leo Laporte
And I guess it would be appropriate, apropos at this time to ask each and every one of you now that you had a week to decompress what you’re impressions were of this year Consumer Electronics Show? Let’s start with Shwood.

Brian Brushwood
As you know this was my first CES and I am betting this is a surprise only to me and that it’s a surprise to no one else. The most exciting thing about actually going to CES is meeting in neat space with all these other names that you only know by reputation and over Skype. It – like that overshadowed all the – I thought all the major announcements were kind of a snore is all 3D social media tablets. Some of my favorite stuffs came from these small cheap booths in the back as I have already said before my favorite thing is the speakers that screw into your light socket. That powered…

Leo Laporte
That was a cool product. I didn’t see if you [indiscernible] (12:42) for you, I wouldn’t have known about it.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, it’s just novel. I mean it’s that old school ingenuity that I enjoyed but it’s an amazing experience, I’ve really looked forward to going back and experiencing again. I wonder how long so many products are going to stay under just one umbrella. It really was like five shows in one. You had an auto show in one hall, you had a small clever electronic show in another hall, you had a little bit of game stuff in another hall, it almost doesn’t – it’s almost too big of an idea now for me.

Leo Laporte
Actually Gina I think you will vouch for this. Gina was pop my cherry. Was it ’93, ’94 we went to – you took me to Las Vegas for the first time and COMDEX, it wasn’t CES. But that’s exactly…

Gina Smith
Yeah, I think we’ve been in 90,000 of them.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, you’ve been in them all. But that was exactly my experience. It was like I am seeing and meeting all these people that I only see – but now it’s Twitter and Facebook but at that time it was writers from PC Magazine or other magazines. I just – it was so exciting.

Gina Smith
For information [indiscernible] (13:43) this time, this was the first time I didn’t get to go to parties or schmooze or see the people like he just said. We actually took 60, 70, 80 video demos of stuff on the floor, we worked constantly inside, a ton of stuff. Hey you are right, it was all about tablets, it was all about auto tech, but I saw this thing this inventor had this kinetically charged device. It kind of look like a vertical…

Leo Laporte
I have it. I am going to show it on Regis & Kelly on Tuesday.

Brian Brushwood
Right on.

Gina Smith
This thing is amazing.

Leo Laporte
You put it in your backpack…

Gina Smith
[multiple speakers] (14:17)

Leo Laporte
The jiggling…

Gina Smith
Jiggling up and down, harnesses kinetic energy and you just walk around the block and you can plug in your iPhone. I mean, how cool is that? Then the inventor came up with the idea while he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. You know, the walk, walk, walk he thought how can I harness this energy and he’s patented that thing up and I think that’s going to be huge.

Leo Laporte
It’s the nPower PEG.

Gina Smith
Yeah. And RealNetworks announced Unifi. Did you guys see that?

Leo Laporte
No, they – it’s funny because their suite was on the same floor as my hotel room and I walked by that suite everyday of the week. And did I ever go in? And you know why I didn’t go in Gina Smith because it’s freaking RealNetworks, I don’t want to have anything to do with those sons of – so, you know what I am talking about Brian?

Brian Brushwood
No, no…

Leo Laporte
You know where I am coming from?

Brian Brushwood
You will lead us sir.

Dwight Silverman
The hardworking people at RealNetworks.

Leo Laporte
Those creeps installed more junk on my system over the last 20 years. I don’t want to – but apparently this Unifi is good. Tell me about it Gina.

Gina Smith
So, what could go down? Clouds can go down. But Unifi was interesting. You can upload all your photos, videos and music up into the cloud and then download them to any device for, they said, between $5 and $10 a month, they announced in March.

Leo Laporte
It’s Dropbox. That sounds like Dropbox. How much storage do they give you?

Gina Smith
Unlimited.

Leo Laporte
Okay, so it’s Dropbox 10 bucks a month for 50 gigs?

Gina Smith
Unlimited and it works on any device, I mean there have been a lot of promise and you’re right Dropbox is kind of like the [multiple speakers] (16:12)

Leo Laporte
I love Dropbox, yeah.

Brian Brushwood
See I don’t understand why businesses with established brand identities get into vastly different other…

Leo Laporte
This is so different. I think of Real as a media player.

Brian Brushwood
Well – and plus one that is generally viewed with skepticism and dislike. It seems like why not launch a new brand, I don’t understand the importance of why tie Real to this idea.

Dwight Silverman
Have been testing about for relevance is what they’re doing, they are trying to find something that makes them relevant after they no longer are, and this is tangentially related to it, I mean it’s music, it’s audio, so it’s tangentially related. What I want to know is that sounds an awful lot like the original incarnation of MP3.com, which got shutdown by the music labels.

Leo Laporte
Because they will be – you will upload your commercial music…

Dwight Silverman
And then you can play it anywhere, that was the idea of MP3.com.

Brian Brushwood
The difference with MP3.com if I remember the original scheme with MP3.com happened at a time when bandwidth was so tight that you didn’t want to actually have to upload your music to MP3.com. So instead what you could do is the scheme that got them in trouble is your physical media disk, it would read the Red Book audio data, it would realize this is definitely a copy of Tones on Tail from 1982 and it would say you now have access to that album on ours. So, but since it wasn’t technically you ripping your own CD and then uploading it to them it was technically them making available to you a copy of the music that you did not purchase. And then even tough it’s the exact same data, it’s all the same digital bits, they nail them on that and that’s how it got shutdown as I understood it.

Gina Smith
Yeah. I mean the things about Real I mean if you hate them or don’t like them, or you hate them or you love them, Rob Glaser who [multiple speakers] (17:47).

Leo Laporte
Who is gone. Who exited in a huff last year.

Gina Smith
He is huffy. He is a huffy guy. They were the first to do audios on the Internet and they were the first for a lot of things and so it made sense that they were first to offer Unifi.

Leo Laporte
I guess.

Gina Smith
They do a lot of far reaching things, but enough about those guys.

Leo Laporte
So, Unifi and the nPower PEG or your picks Gina…

Gina Smith
Yeah, I like that and I’d like to say – for the MacBook Air there is a company called Other World Computing who had a 360 gigabyte tiny, tiny SSD…

Leo Laporte
I need that

Gina Smith
Did you see that?

Leo Laporte
No, I knew that they were going to show but how much was it?

Leo Laporte
No, oh Gina, there is this thing, she is new to the show kids. Forgive her.

Gina Smith
Oh it’s Google.

Leo Laporte
It’s call the chat room.

Gina Smith
Oh thank you.

Leo Laporte
You may remember I used to Google things. I don’t Google anymore, I have externalized my brain.

Brian Brushwood
You have a prosthetic brain.

Leo Laporte
Everything – I don’t need, there’s a thousand people in here, just give me a question, any question.

Brian Brushwood
Hype mind, ask the hype mind, what do you want to know Gina?

Leo Laporte
Ask the hype mind. This is a new feature on TWiT, ask the hype mind.

Gina Smith
What is the founder of Other World Computing famous for? Other World Computing is those one who makes out little drives.

Brian Brushwood
Now here is the trick, this is when – this is when I interrupt and ask a couple of related questions to Leo to buy just enough time for the hype mind to do its thing. So now that we have a moment before we get to your answer…

Leo Laporte
Wait a minute, you are saying the answer is not horse porn.

Brian Brushwood
What?

Leo Laporte
Okay, that was…

Brian Brushwood
It’s tough. Do you think we’ve got Larry O'Connor?

Leo Laporte
We know his name now. He’s famous for Karaoke. He’s calculating, working, working, okay my brain is not as affective as it used to be.

Brian Brushwood
Donkey Kong. The answer is OMG I’m on TWiT that was my favorite.

Leo Laporte
Okay, [indiscernible] (20:08) is actually the right answer and --

Gina Smith
Larry O'Connor is kind of this weird Michael Dell character, when he was in high school in 1984 he was actually selling memory chips, not SIMs but memory chips out of his high school dorm-room.

Leo Laporte
See this is why I love Gina, because she – not only she know this stiff, she knows these people and she probably hung out with Michael, whatever his name is.

Gina Smith
Well, Michael Dell?

Leo Laporte
No, I know Michael but we hung out with Michael Dell, I do remember that.

Gina Smith
Now he is boring, he is…

Leo Laporte
I doubt Michael remembers that though. Do you remember when we got in the car and with Edward Iacobucci.

Gina Smith
Oh, and Ed crashed the car.

Leo Laporte
Crashed the car, never mind we shouldn’t talk about it, hey let’s take a…

Dwight Silverman
Wow!

Leo Laporte
I’m telling you Gina introduced me to the world of the technology conference. Remember the time that we ate Kobe beef on Ziff Davis’ dime and you explained how to hide the boots on the…

Gina Smith
Hide the boots.

Leo Laporte
Hide the boots.

Brian Brushwood
This is where I learned that term, hide the boots.

Leo Laporte
Hide the boots, well guess who taught me how to hide the boots.

Brian Brushwood
Wow.

Leo LaporteGina Smith, baby.

Brian Brushwood
She [multiple speakers] (21:20) TWiT.

Leo Laporte
It all comes back to Gina frankly, everything in technology. All right, we’re going to do one more thing about CES then we’re never going to mention its name again till next year.

Dwight Silverman
I am done with that.

Leo Laporte
And we’ll let you put the [ph] quota (21:36) on this Dwight Silverman, what do you think your impressions after a one week later of CES?

Dwight Silverman
You know I skipped last year, I didn’t go in 2010. I skipped last year and I went again this year and it had the whiff to me of COMDEX. I was at the last COMDEX before it imploded and it’s too big. I think that it’s gotten to the point where it’s almost – it’s very difficult to get anything done if you’re certainly there by yourself and if you have a team, it’s hugely expensive. So I am not sure how long it’s going to survive. I’ll say a Dvorak thing and I would like to say CES is dumped.

Leo Laporte
Really, it was the biggest CES ever, it was 160,000 geeks.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, it was the biggest COMDEX before COMDEX [multiple speakers] (22:27).

Leo Laporte
Well that’s a good point.

Dwight Silverman
I think, it’s too big.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
And that said there were some cool things, but I think people are not quite getting how big Android tablets are going to be. I am a big iPad fan but having seen kind of what’s coming and both what was there in the hopper, I think…

Gina Smith
They are everywhere.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah, they’re everywhere and they’re good and I think that you’re going to see kind of a fundamental change in the way the masses do computing and it’s not going to come from Apple, I think it’s going to ultimately come from Android. And again I love the iPad but I think what’s happening to the iPhone is going to easily happen to the iPad, and I also loved in terms, which is the coolest little thing, was this little ball toy called Sphero.

Leo Laporte
I love Sphero.

Dwight Silverman
Sphero was awesome, it’s a little ball that’s controlled by an iPhone or an Android app and you drive the ball around on the floor. A friend of mine called it 101 ways to drive a cat insane. And I want a Sphero just – it has no point at all…

Leo Laporte
None at all.

Dwight Silverman
It goes and it bobbles around and I just want it just because I want it. It’s cool.

Brian Brushwood
Can I just say real quick, I think Dwight is dead on the money because of a complaint that I heard actually on the TWiT panel saying that CES has become the worst possible time to make any kind of announcement because there is so much it gets lost in the shuffle and that’s when you’re losing money on the table. And I don’t see if it is to survive I think it would behoove them to do a South by Southwest thing where a few days of track one, a few days of track two and a few days of track three where you actually expand it, maybe reduce the size of the show floor or rotate out the stock over time, so you get more announcements of greater significance that could be heard by more people over a longer period of time.

Gina Smith
Yeah, Brain that’s head on. I think that’s why CES this year did ShowStoppers, an evening of that where they showed a bunch of stuff that you might not have gotten to in the floor. Good stuff like that the thing with the balls. Visual experience, they were considerably…

Leo Laporte
They’ve always had those.

Dwight Silverman
We see those every year.

Leo Laporte
Everybody has always had – I disagree with you guys 100%. I think that for one thing because there’s 5,000 press there, yes you’re right, a lot of the releases get buried, but if you have a big release it’s a huge opportunity. So, because the attention is there and if you can manage to be one of let’s say the top five announcements at CES you’re going to get a lot of attention from that 5,000 press. I think there is something to be said for that. I don’t know I think CES felt vital, exciting. It felt like it was really a happening place so…

Dwight Silverman
Leo you don’t think that if somebody made a major announcement that was an important step forward of tech…

Leo Laporte
Like an iPhone on Verizon perhaps?

Dwight Silverman
Well, notice they waited to do that. They didn’t do that --

Gina Smith
A week later, they waited a week.

Dwight Silverman
…during CES and they could have. They could have done that during CES but Apple didn’t want to do it. And I think Apple’s got the right approach there and I just think that no matter what you do in terms of a large announcement. You’re going to get press whether there is 5,000 people sitting in one room or not.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
All right, all right, all right. But I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I think that remember the main point of CES is dealers coming to meet the vendors so that they can order for the next year. They’re certainly in need for that. The reason a lot of trade shows have gone under is because of the Internet certainly is a better place for disseminating information, finding out facts.

Gina Smith
Sure.

Leo Laporte
You don’t really need trade shows unless – my life is a spectacle of it, I just think it’s really fun.

Brian Brushwood
And one thing that never gets shown on even our coverage with TWiT is we don’t bother to show you the three acres of temporary offices setup in the back…

Leo Laporte
It’s all about the meetings.

Brian Brushwood
…because they’re boring, not visually interesting, but meanwhile somebody’s ordering 8 million screws from some other guy.

Leo Laporte
It’s fun, I actually enjoy walking around CES and when I see somebody is on a cell phone, I will get behind them and it’s always like, well I can get you a deal on those. If you only order a quarter of a million, I can get you a better deal if you order 300,000 – I mean that’s really what those calls are going on. You see them going on. Hey somebody just saw, let’s see if this works. That if I type in hide the boots on Google…

Gina Smith
Oh god, it’s going to say my name.

Leo Laporte
The very first entry is…

Brian Brushwood
Hey…

Leo Laporte
TWiT Episode 208…

Brian Brushwood
Hide the boots.

Leo Laporte
And in which I talk about you Gina and the way that Ziff Davis encouraged people to buy expensive things but hide them on the expense report and you taught me how to do that.

Gina Smith
Thanks for that. That will give me a good reputation at my new [indiscernible] (26:54).

Leo Laporte
All I could say [ph] David Burland is (27:00) watch Gina like a hawk.

Gina Smith
Stop it. You know, but notice that we announced BYTE.com the week before CES [multiple speakers] (27:10).

Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe you guys are right. And I think that really, it’s – you know the Verizon thing, we will talk about the Verizon iPhone. That was actually the big story at CES and that happened the next week.

Brian Brushwood
That’s right.

Leo Laporte
And with the fact that it wasn’t announced. I will tell you another, there was another big story at CES and it has to do a little bit with our sponsor, the folks at Ford. Ford chose to announce its Electric Focus, not at the Detroit Auto Show, which is going on right now but at CES. It’s interesting; they announced a new car at a consumer electronics show.

Brian Brushwood
It shows how hip they are to new media, number one with their sponsorships but also with their focus on the Ford SYNC and they understand that the type of people who are going to be excited about these new vehicles are the type of people who are following new media and are into tech.

Leo Laporte
Especially in electric vehicle.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
And I want to tell you a little bit about the Ford Focus, Dvorak is going to get this and I’m so pissed.

Gina Smith
You didn’t get it.

Leo Laporte
No, no, here is the deal. We had a little contest, Ford had a little contest to send listeners to Madrid to test drive the Ford Focus and it turns out that that test drive at the National Testing Center in Madrid, Spain is the day before I get back from my trip to South America. I can’t go. I’m in Machu Picchu that day, so they said well can you send Dvorak. I said, yeah I can send Dvorak. Sure. And I asked John and say, hey John, how would you like to go to Madrid and test drive the Ford Focus, he says yeah, there is three paintings of the Prado I haven’t seen, I want to go.

Brian Brushwood
That’s nice.

Gina Smith
He has a little life.

Leo Laporte
Anyway, I’m glad because we have a number of listeners who are going to Madrid to test drive the Ford Focus, it’s exciting and each of them will have $10,000 for their charity of choice. We will talk a little bit about who those winners are in a little bit. Let me talk about…

Gina Smith
Leo, really quicker about the Ford Focus, you know, Ford, BMW and Toyota all three announced at CES the deals where they’ll have the – you know this dashboard panel that incorporates Pandora, QNX technology, 3G, 4G technology in these cars, so the car technology was hot.

Leo Laporte
I know it’s pretty amazing. But you know they are all playing catch-up to the Ford SYNC, which is truly the amazing technology. I have a Toyota, and like I tell you my next car is, it’s a Ford Focus Electric. In fact I am so excited, I got to sit in the Ford Focus, the electric, it’s going to be a while before it’s out; I think it’s next year. The Focus though is an incredible car, they are going to have gas, they’re going to have hybrid, they are going to have plug in hybrid, they’re going to have diesel and they’re going to have electric, same essential body worldwide and I was talking to Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, watch that by the way we have it on the TWiT Specials stream; and he said, and I think this is very cool, they are building a single assembly line that could do all five versions of the Focus. This is – this solves the conundrum you know of building electric cars, because the car company say well we got to wait till demand, there is no demand till the cars are out there and people have the charging ports, they solved it. They can now build them as demand increases, they build as many as necessary.

Brian Brushwood
This is like the automotive equivalent of dollar cost averaging.

Leo Laporte
Yeah

Brian Brushwood
You buy everything.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Gina Smith
Huh.

Leo Laporte
Just in time production. I’m very excited.

Gina taught me a song. Actually she used to sing it to Abbey when she was a year or two old. Remember that, Gina?

Gina Smith
I’m a little hunk of tin, nobody knows where I have been, right? That one?

Leo Laporte
I got four wheels and a running board.

Gina Smith
I’m a Ford, a Ford, a Ford, honk, honk. [Sound effect].

Leo Laporte
I don’t know if Alan really would appreciate that song. It’s not exactly an advertising jingle bell. I tell you, I have been a Ford family ever since I got that Mustang a couple of years ago. I love it. I can’t wait. My next car is a Ford Focus, lithium ion batteries, higher capacity than the Ford hybrid electric and plug-in hybrid batteries.

You plug it into an electric outlet, standard 120 volt, but if you’ve got the 240, and they are going to have Best Buy by the way. The Geek Squads will come and install this. They actually did a deal with Best Buy to make it very simple to get that electricity in there, get this three hour charging, three hour charging, they’re not talking about range yet but the range will be absolutely comparable with everybody else, which – probably 40 miles, which is – I can’t wait.

And the thing is I can go to San Francisco. I wouldn’t be able to get back unless there’s civic urban chargers everywhere. And I think that that’s the next big thing as you are going to see. GE had some beautiful chargers that they were demonstrating, that cities are putting in everywhere. I think this car is going to power an electric revolution in this country. I am very excited about it.

And of course, yes, the Ford SYNC with MyFord Touch is in there. Not only can you control your music, make handsfree calls, of course, the 911 alerts and all of that, but you also can do battery management via voice as you’re driving. They have an iPhone and Android app that you can check your battery, you can see how it’s charging. You could turn on charging later when it’s cheaper. This is so sophisticated. The SYNC now understands, Alan told me, more than 10,000 commands, that Ford SYNC.

Dwight Silverman
Wow.

Brian Brushwood
Wow.

Gina Smith
That’s very interesting.

Leo Laporte
You stay connected while keeping your eyes on the road, your hands on the wheel. We thank Ford for supporting our coverage of CES. I couldn’t be more excited about where Ford is going with their electric vehicles.

That was to me a big announcement at CES that they could have made, there was a logical place to make – I mean there is a reason why they did it at CES. Maybe it’s just to telegraph that, hey, we understand this is consumer electronics as much as this is a vehicle. But I don’t think CES is obsolete. And I would hate to see it go away because I tell you what; we had a lot of fun covering.

Brian Brushwood
I mean I had a blast. I don’t want to see it go away. For the record, I want to see it expand if anything, and give me different tracks because I was left with the sense that I missed so much. I wouldn’t mind more days.

Leo Laporte
Well, that’s – yeah, and that’s – as a first timer, you have to get over that.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Brian Brushwood
I guess.

Leo Laporte
There’s no way. It’s like going to a big city or to Disneyland. You can’t see it all. You just can’t.

Brian Brushwood
And I guess for you guys because what I’ve heard from all the old timers, sorry for the term, but from what I have heard --

Brian Brushwood
All the seasoned veterans said to me that there were certain things that year-after-year would show up and they never came out. And so you got tired of seeing them all the time and so --

Leo Laporte
That’s right. That’s always a case too.

Brian Brushwood
Well, maybe in a newbie, I don’t know, I’m just like, well, a tablet.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
You know what I did at CES this year and I keep forgetting to mention this. I actually played Duke Nukem Forever.

Brian Brushwood
Oh!

Leo Laporte
What? No.

Dwight Silverman
I played it. I played it. It’s real, yes.

Leo Laporte
No, no, no. How?

Dwight Silverman
They had – in the Dells Suites @ The Palms, they had a gaming area with Alienware and they sat me down with one of their high-end machines and I got to play Duke Nukem Forever. And it was awesome.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, I’ll bet you $100. It definitely comes out this year mainly because – you know my brother was on the team that got canned, 3D Realms.

Leo Laporte
Oh, you know already about this, yeah.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, well, and now that it got all the way canned, Gearbox bought all the rights to it. And Gearbox is not married to it as a concept the way 3D Realms was. They are like, all right, we bought it for this many dollars. We want it out by this date and we can make a profit on it. So it will definitely happen.

Leo Laporte
I am stunned. I thought this thing would never – I mean I thought it was history.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah. Well, there was a fantastic article in Wired talking about why it failed. And the reason it fail is because they had unlimited resources.

Leo Laporte
It was too much.

Brian Brushwood
And they could keep going back and try to make everything right.

Leo Laporte
Right, they kept making it better.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
Some times the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Brian Brushwood
That’s something that Feynman said about computers.

Gina Smith
The good is the enemy of the great? Is that how it goes?

Leo Laporte
I think the perfect is the enemy of the good, right?

Brian Brushwood
Yes, yeah, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Leo Laporte
You try to be perfect you’ll never get it out.

Brian Brushwood
Right, right.

Gina Smith
I guess both are true. I wanted to add something and just throw this out to the floor. I got a chance to catch up with Tim Westergren. He is the founder of Pandora. He was thrilled, of course, with all these auto announcements.

Leo Laporte
We love Tim. And, yes, Pandora is on SYNC, yeah.

Gina Smith
And I said to him, this kills radio, effectively. And I’m a radio person, old radio person, a seasoned radio person like you, Leo, and he said, no, it doesn’t. It enhances radio. I lost that argument.

Leo Laporte
I don’t know how that enhances radio.

Gina Smith
I don’t think so either. I said radio is --

Leo Laporte
I think if you can listen to Pandora, you can listen to a thousand streaming Internet stations. And by the way, we do talk radio, Gina. And of course Pandora doesn’t bite into talk radio but Stitcher does. Stitcher allows you to stitch together podcasts like this very podcast in a row or NPR news or whatever you want to listen to as long as you can download it and you listen to – or stream it and you listen to it on Stitcher. That kills talk radio. I think this kills broadcast radio.

Brian Brushwood
Here’s what I think with Pandora. I think it absolutely enhances radio from a consumer standpoint. You get a better radio experience from a consumer standpoint but it does kill radio as far as a collective consciousness experience. There are certain songs.

Leo Laporte
You can make an argument that the iPod has done that also.

Brian Brushwood
Well, yes, yeah, but like specifically, there are certain songs that we all know.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Brian Brushwood
Even if we all hate that song we all know it because the radio played it to death.

Leo Laporte
[Sings] Never going to give you up, never going to let you down

Brian Brushwood
And it does it and that’s not going to happen anymore with Pandora.

Leo Laporte
Never going to --

Brian Brushwood
I want to hear you --

[Laughter]

Leo Laporte
I think I just rickrolled TWiT.

Dwight Silverman
You did.

Leo Laporte
But that’s exactly the song you don’t want to hear. That and then [sound effect].

Brian Brushwood
Oh, the Tainted Love.

Leo Laporte
Tainted Love.

Dwight Silverman
[Sings] Tainted Love. So I don’t think radio is going to go away mainly because for one reason in most cases, even if the programming is done collectively nationally by a corporation, it’s really pretty local. And Pandora is not local.

Leo Laporte
That’s a good point.

Dwight Silverman
People listen to it. They have an affinity with their local radio station. And it’s similar to what I think newspapers are trying to do when they are trying to intensely localize everything because that’s their strength. And I think that radio broadcast – radio will continue maybe not as a collective place to – here’s the songs we’re all listening to, but I think it will be kind of a community thing.

Leo Laporte
You know, I grew up in the days of what they called full service radio. It was hyper local. You’d talk about the dog show. You’d have classified ads. And I love that kind of old school radio.

Dwight Silverman
That’s coming back. I think that will come back.

Leo Laporte
Which has died out. Yeah. But you know what’s interesting, Dwight, is that the slices aren’t just geographic. There’s also – for instance, I think we are hyper local in that sense for tech enthusiasts, right?

Brian Brushwood
Certainly, for taste, yes, absolutely.

Dwight Silverman
Right.

Leo Laporte
So in a way, we are doing – you know TWiT is global in the most extreme sense. More than a third of our audience is international. We are local in the sense that we’re a tight little group of people with a very specific interest which we hyper serve. That’s what local radio is. It turns out for news you might care more about what’s going on down the street. But when it comes to computers or something – or whatever it is, pez dispensers, local for you --

Gina Smith
Huh.

Leo Laporte
What are you laughing at? Gina, are you a pez dispenser collector.

Gina Smith
No, those guys are geeks.

[Laughter]

I mean we still are radio people.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, those geeks.

Gina Smith
God, pez dispensers.

Dwight Silverman
Gina, that term is niche. We serve a niche.

Leo Laporte
It is niche.

Brian Brushwood
What is it --

Leo Laporte
Local is just a niche. It’s a particular kind of niche that applies to a certain kind of thing. But I think there are many niches and not just the local niche. And that’s the point I’m making in that Pandora and other Internet services can serve non-local niches. You’re right. They can’t be local. But there’s plenty of other niches like our niche.

Gina Smith
True. And you know, all these new media forms are really interesting. And just talking about CES coverage, it’s still going on. People are still posting stuff from CES because there was so much to see.

Leo Laporte
It’s true. It just never dies.

Gina Smith
Yeah, you go to Google and you can search CES 2011 and maybe TechWeb, Pandora, you could see, that Pandora guy’s weak argument that he is not killing radio.

Leo Laporte
He just doesn’t want you to think he is.

Gina Smith
You can see me like totally --

Leo Laporte
The last thing that Tim Westergren wants is the radio guys to come after him, right? He’s holding on until – hey, speaking of some daily news, The Daily iPad app is now going to be delayed. We had heard rumors. I thought this was a great rumor that Rupert Murdoch would join Steve Jobs in the stage at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next week to announce their iPad Daily. Somebody said, boy, how appropriate to introduce – I think it was Jeff Jarvis. He said how appropriate to introduce The Daily in a museum.

[Laughter]

Gina Smith
Jeff is funny.

Leo Laporte
Jeff was right on, on that one.

Brian Brushwood
Also bringing back the steam engine.

Leo Laporte
According to sources familiar with the company’s plans, Peter Kafka writing in AllThingsD says that The Daily will be pushed back to give Apple time to tweak its subscription service for publications. They don’t really have a subscription service right now. So tweak is more – they need to --

Dwight Silverman
Also Jobs or Apple supposedly is telling publishers that they are not going to allow them to offer free subscriptions to the iPad app to their print subscribers, which is what the newspaper publishers really want.

Leo Laporte
Sure.

Dwight Silverman
They want to be able to bundle it.

Leo Laporte
Sure.

Dwight Silverman
And they are not going to let him do that.

Brian Brushwood
I don’t know that I hate – I mean in the short term, I hate that because of course, I don’t want anything free. But I think it may be very forward thinking in that they are saying what people want is the experience of reading the article. What’s so great about the fact that they happen to be printed on dead trees?

Leo Laporte
Right.

Brian Brushwood
And they are trying to cut out that – they are trying to preserve the value of the content as what you really want. You don’t get the content for free because you are buying the dead paper. You’ve got – you just buy the content.

Dwight Silverman
Well, what Apple wants is not so much that. They are after their 30%. If people don’t spend for the iPad app and they get it free, Apple doesn’t get its cuts. So that’s a – it’s a financial argument for them.

Brian Brushwood
Well, now, I am depressed.

Gina Smith
This is a great, great argument he makes. Apple is all about its cuts and all about its money.

Dwight Silverman
Right.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Gina Smith
You talk to any developer and they’ll tell you, they are harsh.

Dwight Silverman
They want their 30%.

Gina Smith
They are the new Microsoft.

[Laughter]

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, man, since when they became the empire?

Leo Laporte
And Microsoft is the new IBM.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Gina Smith
And IBM is the new Amica or whatever.

[Laughter]

Leo Laporte
IBM is the new Atlas Tire I think.

Gina Smith
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte
The new Buggy Whips Incorporated. No, it’s just – that’s what goes around. Actually, I have a book from a guy named Tim Wu called The Master Switch that talks about these cycles. And I don’t want to misquote him. So I am not going to – because I’m just starting it. But it looks like a really interesting analysis of this. In fact, Larry Lessig on the back is quoted as saying this is the best book of a generation. You got to read this book. So I’ll report back next week.

Gina Smith
Yeah, but Larry Lessig will put a quote on anybody’s book.

Leo Laporte
Oh, come on, come on.

Gina Smith
Look at any book in the bookstore. There is a Larry Lessig quote on the bottom.

Leo Laporte
Steve Martin sent me a quote. He says, I know you don’t have a –

Gina Smith
Oh, it might be a blurb.

Leo Laporte
Steve Martin sent me blurb. He said I know you don’t have a book yet. But when you write a book you can put this on the back. I love Leo’s new book. It took me a week to figure out how to open it. Steve Martin.

Brian Brushwood
There was one artist that I forget, I’m sure the chat room will instantly know, but there was some artist who would make a habit of telling any up-and-comer, just make up whatever quote you want from me about this product or service. And there were some – and a lot of people took it to heart. They would write down whatever, whatever it was. But then there were some people who would actually give that quote verbatim on the back of their book saying please make up whatever quote you want for this product or service.

Leo Laporte
That’s so good. I like that. Kind of out them a little bit but I like it. That’s good. All right, we have lots more to talk about. I guess we should – I said I was going to talk about, so we should talk about the Verizon iPhone. How many Verizon customers on the panel today? Okay?

Gina Smith
I will soon be as soon as I can get off AT&T.

Leo Laporte
Oh, there is one. There is one defector.

Brian Brushwood
This is good because I actually want to have --

Leo Laporte
There’s one defector. Are you going to, Mr. Silverman, are you going to defect?

Dwight Silverman
No, I use several times a day the talking on the phone and using the data at the same time.

Leo Laporte
I use to talking on the phone. How is the talking on the phone?

Dwight Silverman
Okay, I’ll send you that e-mail and then just forwarding it to him or giving directions to somebody I have to, I have to be able to do that. And with the Verizon iPhone, I won’t be able too. I also am a little nervous about the fact that they have not said

Leo Laporte
Oh, I see what you are saying. You want data and voice together and you can’t do it.

Gina Smith
Right

Leo Laporte
You are the first person I’ve met because that is one of the things that CDMA network will not do that AT&T’s GSM network will do.

Dwight Silverman
I use it all the time.

Leo Laporte
So you’re the first one I’ve met who said that’s an issue. I mean I have heard it in a theoretical way. Okay, that’s good.

Brian Brushwood
I’m going to say that I’m not switching. And I think everyone will be shocked at how few other people will switch as well. I am not switching and nobody else is either. That’s my claim.

Brian Brushwood
I don’t know if we want to wait to talk about it because I actually have issue with that too. There is a difference between what everyone says they are going to do and what they are going to do.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Brian Brushwood
I believe 23% say they are going to switch or say they really hate the current situation.

Leo Laporte
But they won’t.

Brian Brushwood
They won’t, man

Leo Laporte
I think what it comes down to --

Dwight Silverman
They certainly want to but they probably haven’t looked at their contract.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
If you’re on a family plan, it’s kind of difficult to switch because you end up losing that connection between your family for free voice calls. I think it’s a lot harder to jump away. I think over time, you may see a lot of defections. But you’re not going to see a lot of defections with this phone. I think a lot of people will also wait for iPhone 5.

Gina Smith
I agree.

Leo Laporte
Well, that’s the question I have been asking my radio listeners is, okay, you’re on Verizon. You’ve been waiting for a year. You’ve heard the rumors for a year. You’ve been dying for an iPhone. Yay or in the words of John Oliver of The Daily Show, F Yeah.

Gina Smith
I saw that

Leo Laporte
Wasn’t that a funny bit?

Gina Smith
You could tell he’s never been to a technology analysis before.

Leo Laporte
Well, you know what’s funny is that Andy Ihnatko of MacBreak Weekly was at this event. And he said it was very strange. We’re all sitting there quietly waiting for Verizon to come on the stage. And somebody all of a sudden jumps up and goes, F Yeah. And everybody looks over and it’s John Oliver with the cameras and obviously they were pre-taping this reaction.

Brian Brushwood
Oh, that’s hilarious.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
And then he says – and then he does it again. Obviously, they wanted a second angle as anybody who’s worked in TV knows this was all fake. And then of course they cut it appropriately because they put the F Yeah right after the announcement.

Brian Brushwood
That’s awesome

Leo Laporte
Yeah I know. I love The Daily. It’s the greatest TV show on the world any way.

Gina Smith
It’s totally ruined the ambience of the announcement. Verizon tried to have this little jazz music going on.

Leo Laporte
F Yeah!

Gina Smith
It was great that they just destroyed the ambiance. I was like all for that.

Leo Laporte
That’s John Oliver right there although I think Andy said he felt, you could see afterwards Andy was – that Oliver was a little chagrined that he had to do it and then had to do it again. It’s embarrassing.

Brian Brushwood
Oh, I guess that’s hard in that kind of situation to muster up the courage.

Leo Laporte
It’s all embarrassing. In any event, my point is that there are a lot of Verizon owners who have for a year been dying for this to happen and maybe they will jump. Maybe they will jump. But this is what I tell my radio audience, ask yourself how you’re going to feel in June when an iPhone 5 is announced that supports, let’s say, the Verizon 4G network. Are you going to say F Yeah or --

Brian Brushwood
It’s going to be F Me.

Leo Laporte
Oh, man, I mean that’s going to hurt. And you got another year and a half on your contract and you’re going to have to spend $500 if you want to upgrade.

Brian Brushwood
People don’t realize all the little ways that we have carrots on sticks that trap us into our current situation with AT&T, the first of which is imagine everyone you know who has an iPhone right now. Right now every time you call them, whether it’s morning, noon or night, you are calling absolutely free. You are spending no minutes non-stop. You are able to access your data while you’re on the phone with them. And you are – obviously, you have to pay a termination fee to get out of the contract.

Then you have to pay even more hundreds of dollars to buy the exact same phone that you just bought on a different network. And then that phone is not going to have data while you talk on it. And here’s the part that I think people don’t realize, expect to see a lot of these stories. Right now we have sort of an Obama situation with Verizon where we all hate AT&T and we project this imaginary face on to Verizon. It’s going to be this magical wonderland where we never drop calls and we’re going to find out that Verizon is human just like the rest of us. And those are the stories that we’re going to be hearing about two months from now.

Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. Are you saying there’s no hope?

Brian Brushwood
I’m just saying there’ll be no change. That’s what I’ve been saying.

Leo Laporte
There’s no change

Dwight Silverman
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Also, Leo, I don’t think iPhone 5 is going to be an LTE phone.

Dwight Silverman
Right, it took a long time to go – I think they will wait. They will do – they want to do two things. They probably want to wait till AT&T’s network is a little built out, which starts in the middle of this year. And they are going to want to wait until LTE is mature before they do that. And then they will do a single chip that will be able to handle both networks. And they will be off and running.

Leo Laporte
So in other words, should Verizon customers not worry about iPhone 5 and just take the leap.

Dwight Silverman
I think they could go to iPhone5. I think it will be a different enough phone that it will be attractive if they want to do it.

Leo Laporte
There will be other stuff that they’ll want.

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
But also keep in mind that right now Verizon is tiering the data pricing for LTE but they don’t have an unlimited data plan for LTE. They do have an unlimited data plan for 3G. So if you want to make that jump, it’s going to be a lot more expensive I think.

Brian Brushwood
That – in fact, you actually brought up one other thing as well. Keep in mind also most of the people I know who have an iPhone are still grandfathered in to their unlimited AT&T contract and they all know that once the load gets lightened on the AT&T network, they are going to get a lot more service out of it. And they’ll be glad to have that unlimited. And granted, you will – they are offering unlimited over at Verizon but it’s a big change and it’s a big leap and it’s a big unknown with how happy you’re going to be.

Leo Laporte
Do we know because I think Verizon declined to say what their data plans are going to be.

Brian Brushwood
Oh, really.

Gina Smith
They did decline to say.

Dwight Silverman
They aren’t saying yet what the data plans are going to be for the iPhone but chances are they will be the same as the other smartphones.

Gina Smith
Yeah, exactly

Leo Laporte
They hardly compete with it.

Gina Smith
And one thing, one story that I think it’s going to be the sleeper story I think out of this whole announcement is we all blame AT&T for these terrible dropped calls but what if the fault is Apple’s.

Brian Brushwood
I totally believe that. I believed that for years. I honestly think.

Leo Laporte
I do too.

Dwight Silverman
Me too.

Brian Brushwood
Because I have been with AT&T since 1997 and I never once ever noticed dropped calls.

Leo Laporte
Now here is the counter argument. Apple iPhones work fine overseas.

Leo Laporte
You know what, Brian, that’s exactly how you respond to something like that.

Leo Laporte
Exactly, my point exactly, sir, and then just move on quickly.

Brian Brushwood
See, I kind of learned it for the expert. I’m screwing this all up.

Leo Laporte
Just move on quickly, saying, yes, that’s what I said.

Brian Brushwood
That proves my point, so anyway.

Leo Laporte
And most – 99% of the people listening will go that Shwood is so smart.

Brian Brushwood
Not anymore.

Leo Laporte
He is so smart.

Brian Brushwood
It’s this intellectual honesty. I got to get rid of it if I want to be successful.

Leo Laporte
Never admit it, my friend.

Dwight Silverman
If you talk to AT&T executives and you kind of get them in like a quiet room, they will try to put the blame for the iPhone’s dropped call issue on --

Gina Smith
They blame Apple.

Dwight Silverman
They blame Apple. Everyone would say that on the record.

Leo Laporte
Let me guess, who does Steve Jobs in private blame?

Gina Smith
I am sure he blames AT&T. I’ll tell you I worked in the AT&T building, and I got a big group of iPhone users. We went up the elevator and said what’s the problem. Why doesn’t our phone work in the damn AT&T building?

Brian Brushwood
Anything that’s double digits is insane. They are high on the crack.

Gina Smith
Well, people are miserable.

Leo Laporte
That’s the thing. You can’t underestimate the misery of an AT&T iPhone user.

Brian Brushwood
But, I’ll tell you what, people can be --

Dwight Silverman
Except that in certain locations – if you are out in smaller towns that have 3G --

Leo Laporte
It works fine, I know.

Dwight Silverman
It works fine. It’s in the large cities.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know.

Dwight Silverman
It’s in San Francisco, in New York, in Los Angeles. In Houston, it works pretty good. When we have problems is during drive time when people are on the phone driving home, it’s the commuter town and that’s when suddenly you get dropped calls during the middle of the day. It’s not a real problem here.

Gina Smith
And that points to an AT&T fault.

Leo Laporte
You know who makes the most money in all this?

Brian Brushwood
Who?

Leo Laporte
gazelle.com, it’s funny. They actually told me because they were at the CES. They said, oh, we love it when there are no iPhone. We loves it. And especially if it’s a new iPhone and a separate carrier, we loves it. Hey, let’s take a break. We’ve got a great panel. They are all Southerners. From Austin, Texas, Mr. Brian Brushwood.

Brian Brushwood
Your honor

Leo Laporte
Now, Brian, you got a new site?

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
Tell the people about this new site.

Brian Brushwood
This is a crazy idea. This is a performance art piece that’s going to take me decades to do. And in the end, I will never even get to see the results. And I can’t decide if it’s morbid, if it’s creepy, if it’s distasteful or funny or weird, but --

Gina Smith
In fact, essential at least.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, but basically, my birthday is tomorrow, Jan 17.

Gina Smith
Happy Birthday.

Brian Brushwood
And starting tomorrow --

Leo Laporte
Starting tomorrow.

Brian Brushwood
I am going to have to log in to afterlyfe.me. That’s afterlyfe.me and I am going to have to give it my log in name to remind it that I am alive because this website will have all of my social media credentials. It will have all my Twitter passwords, all my Facebook passwords.

Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. So this is a dead man’s switch for the Internet?

Brian Brushwood
It’s a dead man’s switch for Brian Brushwood. And for the rest of my life I will check in.

Leo Laporte
You have to do this everyday?

Brian Brushwood
Every year on my birthday.

Leo Laporte
Oh, on your birthday, oh, good. I was going to say, if you had to do it every day, you are in trouble.

Brian Brushwood
No, that would be crazy, yeah.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, so, once a year on your birthday --

Brian Brushwood
I have to check in, let it know that I am alive.

Leo Laporte
Can I do this too?

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, that’s what – you know what’s funny. I thought I would do it just for me. But so many people have already expressed an interest. So here is what happening.

Leo Laporte
You got a baby. You got a start-up. You shouldn’t be doing this on the radio for free. You got to be gulped down the Sand Hill Road, baby. You got to sell this. You got to sell this, baby. You’ll make money on it.

Brian Brushwood
Dude, I am a magician. Man, I am a showman. I am P. T. Barnum in the 21st century. So here’s what happens.

Leo Laporte
Let me tell people who are listening because I know the video people would know what we are talking about but the people at home listening, afterlyfe.me is the website.

Brian Brushwood
Yes. And the idea is once it assumes I have died, once I fail to check in and it thinks I have kicked the bucket, it will take all of my tweets and all of my posts, all my social updates, and it will create a digital simulacrum of a living Brian and --

Leo Laporte
Oh, you read Demon. This is straight out of Demon. I know what you’re doing there.

Brian Brushwood
No, I actually haven’t read it. But it will continue – well, the basic thing is at the very least, it’ll re-tweet the last year of my life over and over and over again.

Leo Laporte
I love this.

Gina Smith
I love this too.

Brian Brushwood
Every tax time, you’ll hear me gripe about taxes.

Leo Laporte
Oh, I am telling you --

Brian Brushwood
You’ll get Christmas tweets

Leo Laporte
I am telling you, all you have to do is create a site and have the tag line, the dead man’s switch for the Internet because you got to – because that’s the one line --

Brian Brushwood
Right.

Leo Laporte
That’s the elevator pitch.

Brian Brushwood
Right.

Leo Laporte
And if you did that right now and you charge people $1 a year to renew, right --

Gina Smith
Do it.

Leo Laporte
Every year they have to give you $1 for their birthday.

Brian Brushwood
Okay, and then they get --

Leo Laporte
You have at least – at the very least, $400 or $500 a year, all yours.

Brian Brushwood
This is clever.

Leo Laporte
Pure profit.

Brian Brushwood
Well, the idea also is – here is what blows me away because I thought it’s just a crazy idea because I didn’t if it was morbid or not but the questions people are coming up with are amazing like, can you pre-write tweets to be released to say the things you could never say when you were alive.

Leo Laporte
Oh, like in Mark Twain.

Brian Brushwood
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Brian Brushwood
Right, and I mean other people said can somebody – can you eventually analyze your tweet cloud and come up with new content where it find articles --

Leo Laporte
That’s what it really is. I think we need to get an AI.

Brian Brushwood
The type of articles you would have re-tweeted when you were alive.

Leo Laporte
That would actually just continue you, yeah, yeah.

Brian Brushwood
Exactly, and then that opens up the other idea, what if I become more popular in death as a Twitter account than I ever was when I was alive.

Leo Laporte
That’s what happened to me.

Brian Brushwood
What? You aren’t alive?

Leo Laporte
Everybody knows I’ve been dead for four years. This is just exactly what happened to me. I died in the second year of TWiT. And they have just been – they have video clips they’ve just been coupling together.

Dwight Silverman
They keep re-releasing your albums, Leo.

Leo Laporte
Absolutely, it goes forever.

Brian Brushwood
Can I tell where this actually come from.

Dwight Silverman
This is so getting hacked. Brushwood, this is so getting hacked. Someone will hack this.

Brian Brushwood
People say that but it’s like what you want is to access someone’s social media site. Why don’t you just hack the social media site directly?

Dwight Silverman
Right, but it’s all in one place.

Leo Laporte
Can I ask question? If you do die --

Brian Brushwood
Yes.

Leo Laporte
Does this site suddenly go red or something? I mean is it like a big [sound effect]. He’s dead. He’s dead. I mean is there some alert.

Brian Brushwood
You would have to probably pre-write your tweet saying, hey, as you probably heard, I have croaked. I hope you enjoy re-runs for the rest --

Leo Laporte
Can I tell you something really morbid?

Brian Brushwood
Yes, please.

Leo Laporte
You know I am going to Antarctica. I am going to go on a South America cruise. I will be gone for three weeks, everybody. Sorry about that. But I have to take a vacation someday.

Brian Brushwood
Probably you want to open this account before you go.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, might, well, I was thinking I am going to Antarctica. I am thinking what if I croak. So I am going to actually record a video that says if you’re watching this, I am dead. And then I was going to just give people my instructions.

Brian Brushwood
That’s awesome. You totally should do that.

Leo Laporte
Brian, wash your freaking hair. No, no, I don’t know what it’ll be. But I was thinking – actually, I don’t know, I have a disaster mentality and I will kind of think about – I don’t dwell, I don’t get obsessed – I think about like what if the worst happens. I always – when I go on a plane flight, I am going to say goodbye to my kids as if I may never see them again. And the tongue in the ear, they really are starting to hate that.

Brian Brushwood
The [multiple speakers] (58:45).

[Laughter]

Leo Laporte
But I really was – and I was – probably in the shower when I do this, I don’t know why this stuff comes to me in the shower and I am thinking now what would I say – and I saw myself on the ice-floes getting colder and colder with my camera in my hand recording my last thoughts and I would like you, Brian, to host TWiT for me from now. And is that morbid?

Brian Brushwood
No.

Leo Laporte
It’s exactly what this is.

Brian Brushwood
Well, this is a new world that we live in where the problems that – the abilities we have to extend our personalities and just as we call the chat room your prosthetic brain, you inject your personality into your tweets, your updates and so on.

Leo Laporte
My brain.

Brian Brushwood
And here is – the whole idea kind of flashbacks two years ago. A friend of mine, my best friend from college committed suicide, right.

Leo Laporte
Oh, dear.

Gina Smith
Oh.

Dwight Silverman
Oh, god. Sorry.

Gina Smith
Sorry.

Brian Brushwood
And the way I heard about it was from a dubious source.

Leo Laporte
You didn’t believe it.

Brian Brushwood
Well, there was this flaky kid from high school and I didn’t know if he was messing with me or not, so I opened up IM and there is my buddy’s name and I went to type, I was like, what the hell do you type.

Leo Laporte
Oh. Are you there?

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, you are like, hey, are you dead by any chance?

Leo Laporte
I am glad you can laugh about it now. That’s actually pretty heavy.

Brian Brushwood
And what’s funny is I have spent the last two years like – it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve gotten less angry about it because suicide is a weird thing.

Leo Laporte
Sure. It’s horrible. It’s an angry act.

Brian Brushwood
And you want to blame them and it’s not fair.

Leo Laporte
Please, kids, don’t commit suicide.

Brian Brushwood
How great – oh, yeah.

Gina Smith
Call it suicide line.

Leo Laporte
There’s my little PSA. I think my – call a suicide hotline. Don’t kill yourself because this is not nice. So, everybody – you think it’s going to be good, they’re going to be at the funeral, they’re going to be saying good things about you. First of all, you’re not going to know because you’re dead and second of all, they’re mad at you because it’s like you – it’s damaging thing to do, why do you think you can do?

Brian Brushwood
What they told you? And I honestly think I would have forgiven them a lot earlier if he could have made me laugh or think from beyond the grave with some random thing you’ve tweeted in the past, you know. That’s the idea with all dead.

Leo Laporte
I don’t check that. I think that’s really cool afterlyfe.me I want to do it and I think you should really do a startup, I’m telling you.

Brian Brushwood
All right.

Gina Smith
Not an interface idea for you. You know how you’re going to the doctor and there’s like thing doing, you know, beep, beep, beep for your heart.

Leo Laporte
Oh, you can have like a little.

Gina Smith
You have that – yeah, just have and go flat line when a person dies.

Brian Brushwood
isbrianbrushwoodstillalive.com.

Leo Laporte
It just says, yup.

Brian Brushwood
And still it says, nope.

Leo Laporte
Well, there’s at the – the guy that –

Brian Brushwood
Able to go –

Leo Laporte
Is able to go at death, right? He’s still – he’s not by the way, he’s still like – I saw at TWiT this morning. It kind of reminding me that it was – I guess it was some a bogus information that Nelson Mandela had passed away and somebody from South Africa tweeted. The Twitter is like a serial killer of the Internet. Nelson Mandela got off the phone with him and he’s not dead. And I thought that’s – Twitter declares people dead prematurely all the time.

Brian Brushwood
Oh, yeah. Justin Bieber has to deal with that repeatedly. There’s a waves of Justin Bieber RIPs out there.

Gina Smith
Yeah, when these papers, you know, write well in advance obituaries for people who are likely to die, high risks people –

Leo Laporte
Anybody here ever get that call?

Brian Brushwood
With what?

Leo Laporte
From the newspaper.

Brian Brushwood
Saying that they’re dead?

Leo Laporte
This happened to the Wall Street Journal. It was a very strange thing, I don’t know why but they called me and they asked me a lot of questions and say, wow, you know, we’re thinking of doing an article about you. This was a couple of years ago and then nothing. I think they will write my obituary.

Dwight Silverman
Oh, yeah. I’ve had to do that. It’s kind of creepy to have to do.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Gina Smith
Yes, it is kind of creepy to have to do.

Leo Laporte
You’ve done it too, Gina?

Gina Smith
Yeah, I used to have to do that at ABC News. We do little pieces of people who we expected to die soon. You know Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and we would just create these things and have them ready to run but what happens is sometimes they accidentally run.

Leo Laporte
Yes, Walter, I am standing outside of the house of the Carrot Top who has just recently passed away.

Dwight Silverman
There’s no obit on Carrot Top.

Leo Laporte
No, they’d probably record that anytime.

Gina Smith
Yeah, but I’m going to write…

Dwight Silverman
I think they’ve given up updating the Keith Richards –

Leo Laporte
Keith Richards, yeah, you know he said that in his book in – which is a great book. In fact, let me do an Audible commercial because I’m going to plug his book. He says that in his book, he says, I was on everybody’s death watch list for 10 years. I was the – Rolling Stones had the most likely to die and I am still not dead yet. It’s a great book. Oh, my God. Have you read it, Brian?

Brian Brushwood
No, no, no, I haven’t. I just finally got down with my latest Peter F. Hamilton. Now I got to start the Void, the last Void –

Leo Laporte
I’ve got the Void because of you. I bought The Dreaming Void, that’s a trilogy.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, and that takes like place a thousand years after The Commonwealth Saga, but you’re in the middle of Dark Tower land, right?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, but – Dark Tower – how many books is it?

Brian Brushwood
It’s seven books but then it’s all the satellite books. You really ought to read The Stand and Insomnia.

Leo Laporte
So what I’m doing, I am spreading that because I don’t want to do like – I mean if I started – if I went from beginning and end with Dark Tower even without The Stand and Insomnia –

Brian Brushwood
It’ll be a year and change

Leo Laporte
Is it – yeah, it’s like the rest of my life going to be there. I would have to have a website.

Brian Brushwood
You read the rest on afterlyfe.

Leo Laporte
I have to say if I haven’t finished the Dark Tower, please, come to my grave and read me Volume VII. I am dying to know what happens. That won’t – oh, you know if – with Audible, you can just get me a little iPod and bury with me and just put it press play.

Brian Brushwood
You know, get exactly 30 hours.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, just press play and I know a hot some entertainment for the ride.

Gina Smith
Very nice.

Leo Laporte
Do you Audible, Gina, I haven’t ever asked you?

Gina Smith
I do. I fly a lot overseas, I fly to China, I’m going to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress and so you know, I don’t know if you remember this I’m so good at languages. So I’ll download the Audible language series so that I’ll be speaking that colonial French –

Leo Laporte
Well, that’s a good use of it.

Gina Smith
Oh, it’s great, you’re on the plane for 20 hours and you get off and you could say a lot of things.

Leo Laporte
Donde está, Leo’s grave.

Gina Smith
That’s it.

Leo Laporte
Audible.com/twit2. Here’s what you do. You go there right now, you sign up for the gold – I’m sorry, the platinum account. This is the two-book a month. Oh, look, what’s on the front page? Skippy Dies.

Leo Laporte
Audible.com/twit2, you’ll be signed up for the platinum account, two books a month, just about right. I am telling you if you do any commuting at all, you go through these two books and your first month is free, your first books are free and you get to keep and you can cancel at anytime so you never have to pay a thing. Audible.com, so we’ve given you a bunch of recommendations, Keith Richards’s life fantastic or pick a language training tape, there’s lots of them on audible.com. The news is always that Stephen King stuff including all seven volumes of the Dark Tower saga which I am currently listening to.

Dwight Silverman
Are they going to bridge?

Leo Laporte
Oh, of course, I don’t do a bridge, dude. I do not – yeah, which means they are long. In fact –

Dwight Silverman
They are not long.

Leo Laporte
It’s funny because as he started – as he wrote them, the first ones like seven or eight hours and then it gets longer and longer. I think now the current one is like 30 or 40 hours and it’s like he just had more to say but they are all here. The Gunslinger is 7.5 hours and 24 minutes. The second one, Drawing of the Three12 hours. The third one, [indiscernible] (66:01) I just finished 27 hours. Then, he goes back to 18 hours. No, I just finished The Waste Land. That’s right. I am going to Dark Tower V, 25 hours, 28 hour – it’s a lot of stuff in here.

Gina Smith
Wow!

Leo Laporte
There, you can go on and on and on.

Gina Smith
[multiple speakers] (66:20) series.

Brian Brushwood
Do you hear that Stephen King is writing new stories that take place between books IV and V.

Leo Laporte
Oh, stop it, Stephen.

Brian Brushwood
So, go, keep going, it’s awesome.

Leo Laporte
All right. No, it is – it’s great. Look at, we love books but who has time to read these days? Audible gives you the time by making it possible to listen to great books, read by great readers wherever you are even if you can’t hold the book. I listen at the gym, that’s an hour a day, every single day because I do like to work out everyday.

Gina Smith
The audio you could listen to iWoz on Audible.

Leo Laporte
Your books on there? I forgot.

Gina Smith
Yeah and the guy sounds exactly like Steve Wozniak, I don’t know how they found him but I mean he sounds more like Steve than Steve.

Leo Laporte
They did that with a Keith Richards’ book. They have a guy named Joe Harley and he’s so funny. He sounds a little bit drunk [indiscernible] (67:01) came to my dressing room and I clogged him. I – let’s hear it. I got to hear. So this is Patrick Lawlor. You’re saying he sounds a little bit like [indiscernible] (67:10).

Gina Smith
He does.

Leo Laporte
Oh, by the way, another nice feature of Audible, you can play any kind –

Brian Brushwood
And I remember sitting there and being so little and thinking “wow!” What a great, great world he is living in.

Leo Laporte
That’s sound like –

Brian Brushwood
That’s all I thought. Wow!

Gina Smith
Welcome to iWoz.

Leo Laporte
All right. You know what? Since we have the author on the show, I really should always do that and recommend the book written by one of our hosts, iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way. Gina Smith wrote it with the help of Steve Wozniak. It’s his unabridged autobiography. There is so much great stuff. Audible –

Gina Smith
We were actually the first book on the Kindle.

Leo Laporte
Were you really?

Brian Brushwood
What?

Leo Laporte
That’s kind of cool.

Gina Smith
[ph] Oddly (67:50) because the Kindle was just announcing when the book just came out and they called us and said, do you want to be the first book and I said, how much are you going to pay?

Leo Laporte
Wow!

Gina Smith
And they said nothing. So I said, oh, okay. You know, I have no business sense whatsoever.

Leo Laporte
Nothing. But I can give you some CNET stock, it’s worth nothing.

Gina Smith
[indiscernible] (68:10).

Brian Brushwood
Or is it?

Leo Laporte
Or is it? Audible.com/twit2, get your first two books free. You will love it, I promise. You are all Audible listeners, it’s kind of fun. Dwight, I didn’t ask you? Are you an Audible listener?

Dwight Silverman
I have listened to Audible. I have a six-minute commute to work.

Leo Laporte
You have no need.

Dwight Silverman
I don’t travel that much, so I have don’t have the time but I have done Stephen King on Audible and I think one of the Dark Tower books.

Leo Laporte
I see. Yeah, that’s the way to listen to. Actually, I used to commute to TechTV and I have two hours each way at least, sometimes three [indiscernible] (68:40). And now, I don’t have as much time in the car and it kills me, I want to hear more.

Brian Brushwood
Which part did you miss that?

Leo Laporte
In total – well, I don’t miss the commute, I hated to commute.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
But I do miss listening to books for three hours a day, it was awesome.

Brian Brushwood
For me it will be – I find myself going extra 20, 30 minutes on the elliptical when I work out.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, it’s good for your health. People tell us they lose weight listening to our shows too, mostly because they are vomiting.

Gina Smith
Stop that. That’s not –

Leo Laporte
Let’s move on.

Brian Brushwood
You want to talk about iOS 4.3 beta?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, so – have you looked at, have you played with it?

Gina Smith
[multiple speakers] (69:11)

Brian Brushwood
I mean I’ve gotten hands on with it. All I need like as I got as far as reading hardware switch on iPad equals orientation mark and I was dancing and I didn’t really do anything else. I do not understand why they ever took away that feature and decided we needed a mute switch on the iPad.

Dwight Silverman
They wanted to make it consistent with the iPhone –

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
But that’s a stupid decision because you don’t need it that much on the iPad, you’d got to have the orientation log on the iPad, it’s going to be quick and it’s going to be right there and it was just a really dumb idea and why didn’t they give you a choice from the start? I don’t know. I am so happy about that.

Brian Brushwood
What – and plus also – I always thought they had an inventive and very adequate solution with the iPad where just by holding down the volume down button, it would go volume down, volume down, mute. It would just – it would very quickly go down there.

Leo Laporte
It worked well. It was all we needed.

Brian Brushwood
In fact, I actually never upgraded to the – I still don’t have multi-tasking on my iPad, I have not upgraded because I didn’t want to give up the orientation mark.

Dwight Silverman
Oh, you should do it. It’s not worth throwing that baby out with that bathwater.

Leo Laporte
Yeah I agree

Dwight Silverman
…a whole different machine. You should definitely do it. Although now…

Leo Laporte
Do it, do it. I’m going to tell you, I think multi-tasking is misguided.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah?

Leo Laporte
I end up going into force close programs all the time because I can’t close them anymore because they’re multi-tasking and they need to be closed.

Brian Brushwood
And didn’t – wasn’t it Steve Jobs who went on the record saying, if you ever have to open a task manager on the iPhone [ph] it’d be failed (70:34)

Leo Laporte
Oh, you do!

Brian Brushwood
And then that’s sort of – I find myself force closing them all the time!

Leo Laporte
I – I – these advices are so constrained in RAM and Processor power that I think it’s fine to say you could do one thing at a time. I don’t – I’ve never really liked Android’s multi-tasking, I don’t think the iOS multi-tasking is that good. I’m not convinced that multi-tasking is a good thing.

Brian Brushwood
Especially because it’s not easy!

Leo Laporte
Folders is! You need folders exactly.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, but it’s not even real multi-tasking.

Leo Laporte
No

Brian Brushwood
It’s not multi-tasking.

Gina Smith
No.

Brian Brushwood
Unless I can start downloading a YouTube app…

Leo Laporte
Right

Brian Brushwood
…go do something else, and then come back and then have the video [multiple speakers] (71:04)

Leo Laporte
You know what is beautiful multi-tasking?

Brian Brushwood
Huh?

Leo Laporte
The BlackBerry PlayBook.

Brian Brushwood
You know what? I – you really came up with this thing!

Leo Laporte
BlackBerry PlayBook. Now I’m a little concerned because I am hearing conflicting reports that you may not be able to do e-mail on the BlackBerry PlayBook unless you have a BlackBerry and you can tether it to the BlackBerry. I don’t know if that’s true, we’ll wait and see. RIM has said that the PlayBook which does beautiful multi-tasking it’s a variation of the QNX Operating System will come out in the First Quarter with WiFi. If you have the BlackBerry Bridge software and you have a BlackBerry smartphone connected to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, a little too much BlackBerry for my mind, you’ll be able to get 3G wireless connectivity through your Bluetooth, if you’re all BlackBerry. And apparently that’s how you’re supposed to get e-mail. There will be a security 256-bit encryption during file transfer back and forth with a – I just thought that the way they did it, it was beautiful. Did you see it? Did you play with it?

Brian Brushwood
I did not get hands on with it, but I heard the enthusiasm from both you and – and I think Tom Merritt also got a hands on.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, Gina did you see the PlayBook? Did you get to play with it?

Gina Smith
I did see it, we have a video of it online. If you search in YouTube and that in CES 2011, you’ll see it. We did a whole demo of it. It was remarkable.

Leo Laporte
So it’s kind of, write me a little bit of Web OS in the way of multi-tasks.

Gina Smith
Yes, I mean, it’s true multi-tasking. I mean do you remember when Windows did this fake multi-tasking for a long time I mean, and then suddenly we got our true multi-tasking where things can happen in the background and multi-threading [multiple speakers] (72:35).

Leo Laporte
Oh, for a young woman you’re awfully old!

Gina Smith
I’m extremely old!

Dwight Silverman
Oh that Leo, he knows how to talk to the ladies!

Leo Laporte
You remember when Windows didn’t multi-task, I don’t even remember that! Gina how old are you?

Gina Smith
Young as you! Windows 2.11 and Windows 3.1 neither of them did true multi-tasking. You can only get that in OS/2 at the time, because you…

Leo Laporte
Oh yeah! I forgot. You and John were big OS/2 fans. I forgot.

Gina Smith
I was the Microsoft reporter for PC WEEK, so I was in charge of…

Leo Laporte
I forgot about that. Yep.

Brian Brushwood
And I remember when I got my first computer that was going to be all my own, I had to decide between OS/2 and 3.1.

Gina Smith
It shows.

Leo Laporte
And?

Brian Brushwood
I – hey what else is on the list Leo?

Leo Laporte
So why don’t we move on? So the way you multi-task. So you’ve got an app full screen on the PlayBook and by the way, unlike the Zoom where you couldn’t play with it, you can only watch a video if how it was suppose to work, BlackBerry actually let me play with this. You – if you’re in the PlayBook and there’s a full screen, you swipe your finger up and it – the – whatever is running on the screen minimizes to a cover flow style display and it continues to run, it’s therue multi-tasking we’re talking about. So it’s YouTube video Brian, the video will continue to play, if it’s a game, the game will continue to play in this cover flow, they’re all running at the same time, that means it really good multi-tasking.

Dwight Silverman
And this why they’re having a hard time getting the battery life to last.

Leo Laporte
Well, they didn’t mention battery life.

Dwight Silverman
They should because everything runs in the background and they’re having a hard time making it competitive in terms of battery life.

Leo Laporte
What is the battery life, do you know?

Dwight Silverman
I haven’t heard but everything I’ve seen when you ask them why it isn’t out yet, they keep talking about “we’re optimizing the battery life.”

Leo Laporte
Yeah, in other words…

Dwight Silverman
Yeah and as from what I understand it’s difficult for them.

Leo Laporte
Oh that’s – well that doesn’t surprise me! It’s not an easy thing to do frankly. And may be that’s going to be the fly in the ointment. They do…

Gina Smith
Or the trade-off.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well but how much – I mean look, if I had 4 hours I could live with it. I mean that’s all the Samsung Galaxy Tab has. I mean – but I – it doesn’t have that 10, but if it has 1, I’m not going to – it’s not going to work!

Gina Smith
Yeah he know the old rule whatever they – battery life they say is divided in half that’s what you actually get right. If they say it’s 4 it means it’s 2.

Leo Laporte
They haven’t said anything, that means, it doesn’t have any battery life. That’s very sad.

Leo Laporte
Now both the Zoom and the BlackBerry PlayBook will be running this new Tegra 2 processor from NVIDIA, which I think is part of the power of this. I mean, it’s dual Gigahertz processor it’s a Gig of RAM. I mean this is pretty impressive. So I don’t know, I think you’re right Dwight when you say [indiscernible] (75:23) I thought it was funny because I thought a lot of people came to CES looking for it to be a big tablet expo and probably they were a little bit disappointed. You had to look at the nooks and crannies, but I think you are right. I think this is going to be the year of the tablet, there’s no question.

Dwight Silverman
It’s also – it’s also the, I think it’s the year of the Android and again I’m more of an Apple iOS fan, but I really think that what is happening with Android on Tablets is being really underestimated, I mean – if you wanted to see a Tablet you were – unless you saw the BlackBerry PlayBook and a handful of Windows slates as they call them…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
What you saw was Android, what you saw on the backroom was all Android and I really think that it – by this time next year, I think we’re all going to kind of be a little astounded to what’s happened.

Leo Laporte
I want to talk a little about iPad 2 and the rumors and the counter rumors that are coming up in just a bit before we go I want to take a little break. Thanks to Brian Brushwood for being here, to Mr. Dwight Silverman who is the – an old radio guy too, let’s not forget he does a great show on Pacific Radio.

Dwight Silverman
Seasons.

Leo Laporte
Seasons, I’m sorry.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah we had Leo on a couple of weeks ago and it was a blast, it was a really good time.

Leo Laporte
I’ll do that show anytime. You got about 18 hosts on that show, it’s the biggest group of people I’ve ever seen. What station is that on?

Dwight Silverman
That’s on KPFT, it’s on Wednesday nights at 8:00 O’clock Central Time if you go to kpft.org, you can listen to it, it’s called technology bites, lasts for two hours, no commercials. We’re – we have a great time taking calls and making fun of people on the air.

Leo Laporte
It’s a great – it really is a lot of fun. They’re bunch of geeks. Gina Smith is also here, my old buddy. Currently…

Gina Smith
Your old co-host!

Leo Laporte
My old co-host on the radio and on the TV too. My first co-author, my first co-host on TV and…

Gina Smith
So many firsts, you did everything but take my virginity Leo.

Leo Laporte
And she’s also the – am I turning red right now? I believe I am.

Brian Brushwood
We started the show and Leo says [multiple speakers] (77:28) and then she said.

Leo Laporte
So probably anybody at home listening will think there’s something going on, I don’t know what it is.

Gina Smith
We worked together on and off for a long time.

Leo Laporte
We did. We won’t mention the time that we hold up in the hotel room for three days. To write a book! What were you thinking? It was the only way, frankly, it was the only way we could finish this book, I have it here. The first book that I ever wrote. You had written a book before, right Gina? It wasn’t your first.

Gina Smith
Yeah. I have – I wrote a book about tool book, if anyone remembers that? No.

Leo Laporte
Tool book?

Gina Smith
But that book actually did better than – yeah tool book was Paul Allen’s project.

Leo Laporte
Oh Gee.

Gina Smith
Remember it’s a object oriented program?

Leo Laporte
Oh I dimly remember that, yeah. Well she’s so – I remember we were driving around L.A. in a Miata.

Gina Smith
Oh I remember that.

Leo Laporte
Remember that? It was so scary because this thing was smaller than – it was so low on the ground. I thought it was going to be fun like a Convertible Miata, it was so low to the ground that we actually could look under the trucks as they drove by and I thought, I’m going to get trapped under a truck, I really am! And you said.

Gina Smith
I remember that. [indiscernible] (78:33) back and forth to MGM!

Leo Laporte
Right.

Gina Smith
We were crying for help. MGM figured out what to do with interactive TV.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Gina Smith
You remember that?

Leo Laporte
Yes, I do remember that. I also remember our boss Jeeves Davis saying, we don’t have any plans to do anything with MGM just stall them.

Gina Smith
I recall that.

Leo Laporte
I think we – now it can be told right? Maybe I should have just saved that for my death tweet, from the grave.

Gina Smith
Once you said hide the boots that I [multiple speakers] (78:58)

Leo Laporte
Everything else was out now, we call out.

Gina Smith
I pretty much lost my job.

Leo Laporte
No, you haven’t.

Gina Smith
Thanks for that.

Leo Laporte
So we pretty much, we made a deal to do this book. You called the media like I was [indiscernible] (79:08) Miata. She’s calling your editor saying we’re going to do a book and then the deadline came, and we hadn’t really written much of it. And so we said okay we got to buckle down, we got a hotel room and we literally, we sat up in that hotel room and we wrote and we wrote and we wrote and we finally got that book out there. There wasn’t a lot of fun, it fun already actually. It was already. So let me take a break, we’re going to come back, we’re going to talk a little bit more, lots to say still about my virginity
.
Gina Smith
How long the show lasts Leo?

Brian Brushwood
45 hours. We’re almost in the first 10% hang in there sweetheart.

Dwight Silverman
It’s like a Stephen King book.

Gina Smith
It is.

Leo Laporte
Gina’s never done this before. Gina if you’d like to go to the bathroom, if you’d like to take – go get a beer, if you’d like to go to bed for an hour to – go right ahead. Take a nap, it’s fine, Dvorak does that frequently during the shows, it’s okay.

Brian Brushwood
You got to roast a baste, now is a good time.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah, he likes to cook during the show.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
This is his opportunity to get some cooking done. We’ll be right back --

Leo Laporte
But I do want to mention our friends at Citrix, again another Gina Smith connection because you and me and --

Gina Smith
Yakabosky.

Leo Laporte
Ed Yakabosky, who started Citrix, he’s moved on but Citrix really was – the reason Ed knew so much about how to multitask on windows, how to do remote access and what else is because he wrote Windows NT. He was on loan from IBM --

Gina Smith
He wrote OS/2 --

Leo Laporte
Well --

Gina Smith
He wrote OS/2.

Leo Laporte
No, that was the story though is that yes he was on the OS/2 team at IBM, and IBM lent engineers to Microsoft to work on in the NT kernel and he was one of them. And Windows, Microsoft lent engineering staff to OS/2, and the story always was, of course it’s not fully true, but the story always was that pretty much IBM wrote NT and Microsoft wrote OS/2, and yet Ed was the guy on the IBM OS/2 team --

Gina Smith
Yes.

Leo Laporte
Who in fact did a lot of the Windows kernel. And what that led to is the best remote access. It’s still used everywhere at the Citrix Enterprise server in – for remote access in Enterprise and of course they also do great consumer products like this, gotoassist.com. This is a remote access product that’s used by support professionals all over the world to get their job done. In fact, I just read a study that said the people who used GoToAssist reported about a 40% increase in productivity, it’s like two extra days a week because they don’t have to go down the hall, they don’t have to get on the phone and walk you through it, they don’t have to travel to help you with your problem, they just get on GoToAssist and fix it right there through the internet. In fact, you don’t even have to have it installed ahead of time if – you know, if the support person has it, they just send you a link, you install it, and boom, they are fixing your computer. I do this with my mom, it’s amazing. If you are in the support business, we all have our tools, this is the tool you got to have for remote access. Gotoassist.com/twit, you can try it free for 30 days. Gotoassist.com, try it free for 30 days, you don’t want to have those long phone calls, you don’t want to have that feeling of I wish I could help them but I can’t because I’m not right there, you want to fix the problem, you want GoToAssist Express.

Brian Brushwood
Leo, just promise me that GoToAssist has some kind of Mothers’ Day special.

Leo Laporte
They really ought to. That’s a great idea.

Brian Brushwood
I even understand why they’re limited their business use. I mean this is if you have a mom who calls…

Leo Laporte
Well, they – I agree, they encourage – you know, this is really designed for pros, but I use it absolutely. They have – most people get the monthly subscription because they – you can have an unlimited amount of support. But truthfully they have a day pass, and I think that’s for the --

Brian Brushwood
That’s when you bust out.

Leo Laporte
We call that the good son pass.

Brian Brushwood
Which would you rather use, spend the next hour on the phone or spend whatever the day pass is?

Leo Laporte
Right. Right. Get the day pass. It’s the good son pass. In fact what I would do is stack up all the requests and on – let’s do it for Brian’s birthday on the 17th of each month. Just say, I’ll take all your requests here. Gotoassist.com/twit, give it a try. I think you’ll absolutely love it. Do you do a support for your mom?

Brian Brushwood
You know, she’s suddenly got like real contentious. I think a lot of our parents grow up just assuming that the kids are always there to help them or something. Then all of a sudden mom was just all of a sudden really courteous about when she calls in favors…

Leo Laporte
My mom does that too --

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
She says I want to ask you for tech support but why is there more mojo on my We Rule farm. You know I got to tell you as good as GoToAssist is, it doesn’t allow you to remote access anybody’s We Rule farm. Gina, do you have an iPad Gina?

Gina Smith
You know I can’t get [ph] David Burland (83:50) buy me that [ph] damn (83:52) thing. And I’m not paying my own money for a product I’m going to be reviewing.

Leo Laporte
Oh, that’s a good point. Wait a minute. That’s – I always pay money for the products I review, that’s my new policy. Did you know that? I don’t take loaners anymore.

Gina Smith
Well, I mean I – I’ll return it, I will return it, but if I’m going to review the new iPad, they should --

Leo Laporte
Apple, give, Gina – oh, Gina I should have warned you, if you appear on a TWiT show you are now persona non grata to Apple for the rest of your life.

Gina Smith
Thanks. Thanks for that too now, no more Jobs, no more Apple. What else can you do to my career, Leo?

Leo Laporte
Let’s talk about the – I’m going to ruin your career by hook or by crook. The new iPad – according to Engadget, the new iPad will not be out till April, which makes perfect sense, that’s when the iPad came out --

Brian Brushwood
I can’t believe the iPad is not even a year-old yet.

Leo Laporte
Isn’t that amazing?

Brian Brushwood
How old hat does it already seem.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
It seems like it’s been there forever.

Brian Brushwood
Yeah, like how do we ever not have them.

Leo Laporte
You know it’s funny because the day before it came out I kind of made a mental note to myself, this is the last day of my life I want to have an iPad.

Brian Brushwood
Really?

Leo Laporte
Well I kind of had that feeling that this was going to be a seminal event, a watershed in technology that from then on, and I was right --

Brian Brushwood
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
That the conversation would include iPad, that that’s a device that’s not --

Brian Brushwood
You were 100% right. I was totally skeptical and I was 100% wrong.

Leo Laporte
Wow!

Brian Brushwood
I mean I own iPad now, I mean I bought one – I bought --

Leo Laporte
You know what’s ironic? I never use it except to play games.

Leo Laporte
Although I love Flipword. We were – Gina and I were talking about Flipword. Isn’t that a great --

Gina Smith
Flipword’s, yes.

Brian Brushwood
Oh, fantastic.

Dwight Silverman
Flipword is awesome.

Leo Laporte
I’m going to --

Dwight Silverman
But it’s assumption basically, it’s also social media.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
One of my colleagues at the Chronicle is hell bent to use the iPad as a serious work device and he was telling me, well I can get my documents from here but I can’t get them all the way over here and --

Leo Laporte
Yeah, hell bent is the word.

Dwight Silverman
And I tell him, give up, you know, it’s not what it’s for.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. You really have to – you know, well, and I see people do this, “oh, well I have the Bluetooth keyboard, I have the special case, I have the special stand”, get a freaking laptop for crying out loud.

Gina Smith
Literally. Literally.

Leo Laporte
You know, what are you trying to do here. So this is what Engadget says, and I think it makes a lot of sense. We were talking about the NVIDIA Tegra 2, which is based on the ARM processor. Boy, CES was an ARM show, it wasn’t an Intel show.

Gina Smith
It sure was.

Brian Brushwood
Do they have that [ph] mega 12 punch, Windows says it’s (86:08) going to run on ARM and oh by the way, NVIDIA’s now going to challenge Intel.

Leo Laporte
Right. I mean basically that’s what happened. It was a shocker for those of us who’ve been living in a WinTel world for the last couple of decades. Apple is reportedly working on an A5 CPU, a successor to the CPU than the iPhone 4 and the iPad, that will be based on the A9, it will be dual-core just as the Tegra 2 is. Now the Tegra 2 has NVIDIA GeForce technology in their GPU. I would imagine Apple is also looking at upgrading the GPU in their chip. Here is what’s interesting. Now this is again just rumor, Apple doesn’t say, but Engadget says the iPad 2 or the iPhone 5 will have a QUALCOMM chipset in it that does CDMA, GSM, and UMTS, in other words --

Gina Smith
That makes total sense because --

Leo Laporte
Of course it will.

Gina Smith
They can work with the Verizon people.

Dwight Silverman
One device [indiscernible] (87:02).

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Although I kind of thought maybe the Verizon iPhone would be that device but no, it’s a pure CDMA, so I guess it just make a second model. Engadget says, and this confirms what you say Dwight, no LTE in that chip.

Dwight Silverman
And so I think that what they may be going for is not necessarily storage, but – so you could get your pictures from your camera into it easily.

Leo Laporte
They do have – okay, maybe they would treat it the same way they treat that dongle because they do have that dongle, but there is no file system, it’s just that the program has to read…

Dwight Silverman
Right, you put it in and it grabs the images and puts it on, on the pad.

Leo Laporte
Right, right. Maybe that’s what’s going on.

Brian Brushwood
I could see that.

Leo Laporte
I could see that.

Gina Smith
Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable.

Leo Laporte
I still call bullhakki.

Gina Smith
Do you?

Dwight Silverman
But what will happen is, is that people are going to complain because they can’t use it as storage, they won’t be able to use it as a storage in the pure sense of the word.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
And so you’ll – and the jail breakers will get to it and have fun with it, and that should be interesting.

Brian Brushwood
What – Dwight, have you heard the rumor about a button-less iPad or a button-less iPod?

Dwight Silverman
Buttonless – there are supposedly prototypes floating around the Apple campus that where there is not button and instead they are using multi-touch gestures to get back to the homescreen and....

Leo Laporte
That’s what both Motorola and RIM kind of did, right? I mean that’s...

Gina Smith
Yeah. And Leo I saw at CES, 3M was demonstrating a technology that could take 600 touches – no, 60, sorry, touches at a time.

Brian Brushwood
Thanks goodness.

Leo Laporte
Wow!

Leo Laporte
Because it only have.

Brian Brushwood
Me and my 10 buddies, 11 buddies.

Leo Laporte
What – what the hell.

Brian Brushwood
12 buddies.

Leo Laporte
What the hell?

Gina Smith
Well, for these large screens so that if you’re in a hospital environment or something, a lot of people will be able to…

Leo Laporte
Well, that’s sanitary.

Gina Smith
[indiscernible] (90:44) over here do this, do that. But the – and they also announce a technology of the sensors for [indiscernible] (90:51)...

Leo Laporte
That’s kind of interesting.

Gina Smith
...so – it was really need again – all these videos are on the website...

Leo Laporte
Did you see the Surface 2? Did you really impress by that?

Brian Brushwood
I didn’t see it.

Leo Laporte
Hey, only $7,600.

Brian Brushwood
There is night clubs I can afford that.

Leo Laporte
All right, we got two more stories I want to mention. This was a big story. We talk a lot about it on this WEEK in GOOGLE, I don’t know if we’ve talked it out but Google has announced. This is a little inside baseball so let me explain. There is a new HTML standard, as you well know HTML5, everybody is getting behind it, Apple, Google, everybody, even Microsoft. And in HTML5 there is a tag, <video>. The idea is if we could only decide what standard to use....

Gina Smith
What standard.

Leo Laporte
...for video then it would be so easy for a website to embed video, they just use this <video>, you wouldn’t need a plug-in. All the browsers would support it. There is no agreement right now on what that standard should be. The de facto standard for videos what you’re watching right now which is H.264, that’s the video format we use, that’s all our streaming partners, even if it’s wrapped in Flash, it’s H.262. Google has announced, we will not support H.262, that is not going to be our choice for the video tag in Chrome, they’re open to throw their market weight behind something called WebM. They have bought WebM from On2, when they bought the company, and they’re open-sourcing it, they’re licensing it, to anybody can use it, royalty free. There is some debate over the quality of the codec, that’s not really the issue. I guess the issue is, isn’t H.262 a de factor standard? Is WebM even out there? What are you going to, re-encode all the YouTube videos. You’re going to tell me I have to start encoding to my stuff in WebM so you can embed it. And here is the big – I think the big interesting story that we talked about on this WEEK in GOOGLE doesn’t this in a way give a win to Adobe Flash because if it’s not built into the browser everybody’s going to have to download Flash to play it.

Brian Brushwood
Well and this was what I like most about Dwight’s article because Dwight wrote about this on blogs.chron.com, and specifically Dwight points out that, okay, I get it, you’re saying you’re preferring open over close, well if that’s the case, why don’t you yank Flash support, not of Chrome, right Dwight?

Dwight Silverman
Yes. And the thing is, is that Google could end up – could use H.264, their argument is also one of cost. But...

Leo Laporte
Yeah, and they can afford it, I mean there is a fixed cost from MPEG LA, but they’re saying others can’t.

Dwight Silverman
Right. And...

Leo Laporte
And by the way, I could be one of the others because right now we don’t have to pay a royalty to MPEG LA but there is no reason why we might not have to down the road.

Dwight Silverman
In the future. Got to try. But are you going to yank it just because of what might happen. You know, Ed bought really nice piece looking at the cost...

Gina Smith
It was an excellent piece.

Dwight Silverman
Yes. On the cost of exactly what H.264 cost. And for Google, it’s like surrounding area. It’s not much at all.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
And so, I think it’s a little bit disingenuous, they are trying to force the standard that they want to do. The only problem is, is that Chrome doesn’t have that kind of share to force the standard. If this was...

Leo Laporte
Well, but if you combine Chrome and Mozilla, by the way the Mozilla group also does not support H.264 for the video tags. So...

Gina Smith
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
But Microsoft is.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman
And that’s regardless...

Leo Laporte
That’s less than half.

Dwight Silverman
...of how much share they’ve lost, they are still the most used by [indiscernible] (94:19)...

Leo Laporte
Are they? Oh yeah, but they are not half of the audience.

Dwight Silverman
No, no, but they are still – they still are a big player. And so – and Safari is also doing it. And not only that but there’s all these iOS devices that are out there, the iPad, the iPhone and a lot of web developers have pointed that H.264 that’s what they are using. That’s what you use, Leo.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. I thought about this.

Gina Smith
Yeah, I mean Leo does.

Dwight Silverman
I think it’s not smart.

Leo Laporte
I thought about this long and hard because my initial reaction is screw you Google. But in fact...

Brian Brushwood
Which was a good initial reaction for anything.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. It pretty much works in every formal – or in formal occasion. But I finally decided that I think Google’s on the side of the angels, they are trying to promote open standards. They make the point that H.264 [ph] has patent that’s (95:06) encumbered and you cannot predict what MPEG LA is going to do, admittedly it’s not that expensive, now I don’t pay a royalty now but that could change. WebM isn’t – some people say, well, there is going to be lawsuits about WebM because even though they claim to be open, there is also a counter claim that there is some code in there that isn’t – that is proprietary and so there is going to be lawsuits, it’s going to be a mess in Google. I think they are saying, yeah, we know it’s going to be a mess, but in the long run it’s needs to be open. And I thinks if it’s – you could always do plug-ins. This isn’t about whether you can run Flash.

Brian Brushwood
Right.

Leo Laporte
And Google supports Flash, it’s not that – and Google’s going to, it’s not about plug-ins, it’s about what does HTML5 support as a open free codec. And I think WebM is the only choice that’s appropriate for that.

Brian Brushwood
But given the [indiscernible] (95:53) opening up so much trouble, is it another case of the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Leo Laporte
Well, it might be. And you’re right, a lot of people accused Google of profiteering on this, this isn’t really about open – I disagree, I don’t think this is – I don’t think Google is trying to make money out of this.

Brian Brushwood
I would agree with you.

Leo Laporte
Before that it’s going after Apple, some people say that [indiscernible] (96:11) Apple.

Gina Smith
I mean – Leo what’s really disturbing to me, I mean it’s just another example of the Microsoft [ph] Civilization (96:16) of Google. I mean this is...

Brian Brushwood
I thought Apple was the new Microsoft.

Dwight Silverman
Everybody wants to be the new Microsoft.

Gina Smith
I changed my mind. They just decide, everybody is using the standard, we’re just going to pull it and put in our own, there is no reason I couldn’t have kept the current H standard in there in addition to this other one. This reminds me so much of Microsoft and the whole Java...

Dwight Silverman
If you care about your users and you wanted to be a simple and as basic – yeah, you can install plug-ins. But you know what, you shouldn’t have to.

Leo Laporte
It has to be in the browser.

Dwight Silverman
You care about your users, you wanted to be a simple, you want your browser to support everything that’s thrown at it and want to do it natively. And it they are serious about not – about supporting open that get rid of Flash.

Leo Laporte
That’s in fact what Kevin Marks said, he quoted, Postel’s law which says, be very open about what you support, be very narrow about what you do, but be very open about what you support, it support everything, in other words because it’s for users. I just think what Google’s doing and kind of admire for them for this is they are saying, we’re going to take some pain, we’re going to bite the bullet because in the long run open is better, it will not be easy at first, but in the long – now they are doing it for us. But, always use a different browser, you’re going to always put in Flash, you’re going to always put in a plug-in. But I think that they are doing the right thing here. I don’t think it’s an easy thing for them to do. And I think that there is a lot of good reasons to dislike it. But if we five years from now, if we look back and we say, hey this is great, there is a standard video codec, there are others out there but that’s open, nobody has to ever pay for that’s supported by all browsers universally, I think it will have been worth it.

Brian Brushwood
I am going to defer to you because you obviously [ph] Nomar (97:59), you have a more vested interested in video…

Leo Laporte
Oh I have a dog hunt approach in this.

Brian Brushwood
Right. But me as a consumer, I am super annoyed that Chrome has always been the lightest, most [indiscernible] (98:08) browser and that’s why I loved it.

Leo Laporte
Well, wait it makes it more so.

Brian Brushwood
Well but, no, because there is a lot of sites, I’m actually installed plug it on now.

Leo Laporte
Right.

Brian Brushwood
And I am annoyed.

Leo Laporte
Well this is – this is – I was mad at Apple for not supporting Flash. But I think that’s been good for the Internet – ultimately good for the Internet ecosystem. Let’s get rid of Flash, now admittedly this – short term this doesn’t get – this does the opposite.

Brian Brushwood
Right.

Leo Laporte
It helps Flash.

Dwight Silverman
Well Apple’s arguments about Flash were technical and Google’s arguments about H.264 are religious. And I think that that’s wrong. I can see a technical argument. I can see a religious argument.

Leo Laporte
Well there is a technical argument. The technical argument is, it’s open.

Dwight Silverman
I think killing, it is dogmatic. I think killing is dogmatic.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. You make a point.

Gina Smith
Yeah. I think Ed Bott article was tremendous.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Ed’s been very good on this MPEG LA stuff. He’s really been a good at debunking it. However, I think it’s fairly complicated. I do encourage people to listen to this WEEK in GOOGLE this week. Kevin Marks, who was at QuickTime, knows a lot about this stuff, talks very – from a very knowledgeable point of view about, he’s not happy about it but I would say that’s fairly safe to say.

All right, we’re going to wrap up with some numbers. You want to hear some numbers? The Internet in 2010 – this is from the website royal.pindgom.com, they collated numbers from – of Internet usage from 2010, the numbers of emails sent on the Internet, 107 trillion.

Brian Brushwood
Now at first I was annoyed because I didn’t have context for this, because I don’t know what they were in 2009, 2008, but then I realize that when I was a child the number of emails...

Leo Laporte
Zero.

Brian Brushwood
...was essentially zero. From zero to 107, the world has transformed, it’s so amazing.

Leo Laporte
It’s almost 300 billion a day.

Brian Brushwood
In my lifetime all this has erupted.

Gina Smith
There were like 25 on prodigy.

Leo Laporte
Here is an important number, I think this may be a more important number, 1.8 billion email users worldwide. That’s really amazing. That’s the number of people who can send and receive email.

Brian Brushwood
Instantly.

Leo Laporte
Instantly.

Dwight Silverman
That’s all?

Leo Laporte
Well, how many --

Dwight Silverman
That’s all? There are 6 billion people in the world – 6 billion people in the world.

Leo Laporte
That’s a third, almost a third. Yeah. But remember --

Brian Brushwood
Yeah. Hey man the rest of them are trying to find clean water.

Leo Laporte
Yeah. Some of them don’t have drinking water. New email users since last year it’s an increase of 480 million almost half a billion, so it’s going up fast. Now this is the sad one – almost 90% were spam. That’s the sad one.

Gina Smith
That surprised us.

Brian Brushwood
But wasn’t the rumor that spam is going down and people are realizing there is more money in hacking people’s account?

Leo Laporte
255 million websites. That’s 21 million new websites this year.

Dwight Silverman
That doesn’t count geocities?

Gina Smith
God Leo, Remember when there were 10, you and I were looking at the 10 websites in existence that night in that hotel room.

Leo Laporte
Wow! Geez Louise, I’m that old?

Gina Smith
And that was what, 12 years ago, that was you and me looking at 10 websites that existed, and now --

Leo Laporte
It is estimated worldwide that there are almost 2 billion internet users.

Gina Smith
Wow!

Leo Laporte
14% increase. And the biggest increase is of course in the third-world, and I think a lot of that’s powered by mobiles that can handle it, you know, small devices, internet connected. And this is by region, Asia, wow!, 42%; then Europe, 24%; 13%, North America; then Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Australia.

The number of blogs, 152 million. The number of tweets, 25 billion.

Gina Smith
Oh yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte
It was a lot of wasted time. And the number --

Brian Brushwood
No it’s not though, man, this is the collective diary of planet earth. And we started keeping a diary in the past few years --

Leo Laporte
That’s a good way to put it.

Brian Brushwood
And it will live for all eternity. We – right now we have such a skewed view of what happened in the 1800s --

Leo Laporte
That’s true.

Brian Brushwood
Because it was written by other people who weren’t there.

Leo Laporte
We will know what Thomas Jefferson had for breakfast next time.

Brian Brushwood
We will – and it will be authentic. I think this is one of the greatest things ever. And we have a tendency to poo poo, but I think it’s wonderful.

Leo Laporte
Who’s the number one twitter user. Lady Gaga. 7.7 million followers.

Gina Smith
Hey I follow her.

Leo Laporte
And they’re little monsters, all of ya. 600 million people on Facebook. 250 million of them new. 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month. That’s amazing.

Gina Smith
That’s all this picture – that’s all that porn on Facebook they’re sharing.

Leo Laporte
Did you – yeah, right.

Gina Smith
Did you read that story?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I did. I decided not to report on it today because I didn’t want to give people any hints. 2 billion videos a day watched on YouTube. 35 hours – this – remember it was 12 hours at the beginning of the year, now 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Gina Smith
Wow

Brian Brushwood
Again, it’s all authentic video. Everything we saw --

Leo Laporte
I agree with you, it’s a revolution, completely.

Brian Brushwood
before 1940 is fake and a lie and I don’t believe it.

Leo Laporte
5 billion images on Flicker, 3000 uploaded a min. I think these numbers actually tell a story that I think I agree with you Brian is ultimately democratizing, ultimately very exciting.

Brian Brushwood
Here’s the part that blows my mind is when I was a kid, I – must have been ‘87, ‘88, I read Ender’s Game.

Leo Laporte
Yeah.

Brian Brushwood
And you read about Ender’s parents reading the blog essentially what were blog post before there were blogs and stuff and deemed if that’s not exactly where we are right now. And now I find myself reading crazier science fiction about post singularity universes where people are backing up their memories and wholly crap does it make me not want to live another 50, 60 years.

Leo Laporte
I know that’s why I don’t want to die because I want to see what happens, not for any other reason, I just can’t wait to see what happens.

Gina Smith
Leo I once interviewed a famous – Isaac Asimov and he

Leo Laporte
Wow!

Gina Smith
and I said, how do you come up with these ideas and stuff, and he said, you know, you can always what technologies are coming in the future because all the geeks that are reading science fiction end up growing up to build that stuff.

Leo Laporte
I agree, I’ve talked to many physicists who said that’s exactly why I decided to work on the stuff I worked on because I read about in sci-fi --

Brian Brushwood
Now think about this --

Leo Laporte
And I want to make it real.

Brian Brushwood
In a weird way, doesn’t that make science fiction authors the architects of the future?

Dwight Silverman
Yes.

Leo Laporte
Yes.

Gina Smith
It does.

Leo Laporte
Yep.

Brian Brushwood
Because by predicting the future they shape it because I guarantee you the people working on the iPad were fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and they watch them…

Leo Laporte
Well, if you listen to – Jerry Pournelle was on last week, if you listened to – and the week before, if you listened to Jerry Pournelle he said you know what that comes from, my book, The Mote In God’s Eye, when we had little portable computers, handheld computers. And absolutely that was a meme, a trope in all the science fiction of that era --

Gina Smith
That’s amazing.

Leo Laporte
…and that’s why we have the iPad, absolutely.

Brian Brushwood
Just bring me a space elevator. How fast can we go to Space elevator.

Leo Laporte
I want a flying car.

Dwight Silverman
When I interviewed the founders of Palm years ago after they had just come out with their – with what was then just a PDA and if you remember it had like a plastic flap that covered --

Leo Laporte
Right.

Dwight Silverman
the screen to protect the screen. And I said this looks just like the communicator in Star Trek and he said that’s why we made it look like that.

Leo Laporte
You don’t think that --

Gina Smith
Yeah, he told me that too. That was Jeff and Donna, they were big geeks.

Dwight Silverman
Yeah.

Leo Laporte
Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. Yeah.

Gina Smith
Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, was that?

Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gina Smith
And they were geeks.

Leo Laporte
If you don’t think that StarTAC from Motorola looked the way it did because of Star Trek

Dwight Silverman
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte
You’re not --

Dwight Silverman
That’s why it was called StarTAC.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course.

Dwight Silverman
They got as close as they could.

Leo LaporteGina Smith is the new Editor-in-chief of the old Byte magazine, it’s so glad, she’s bringing back Byte. If you never read Byte, let me tell you that was what influenced me. I’m sure it influenced most of you listening.

Gina Smith
Everyone.

Dwight Silverman
Yep, absolutely.

Leo Laporte
It was the magazine of the computer revolution. It should be back. Absolutely should be back.

Gina Smith
You can go to www.byte.com to email me directly, to get information about it, and if you like our page on Facebook, I know there’s a bunch of pages but it’s Byte the company, that’ll be really helpful and I’m looking for ideas. So if you want to email me directly, please do. I love to hear ideas.

Leo Laporte
And Gina...

Gina Smith
What do you want to...

Leo Laporte
I know you don’t have anything to do with this, hidetheboots.com. Social engineering with a kick, hide the boots is a business strategy device by Gina Smith.

Gina Smith
Oops. Jesus. You wrote that out Leo, did you?

Leo Laporte
Hide the Boots is more than a six point plan; it is a way of life.

Gina Smith
Oh I love and fear the chat room.

Leo Laporte
I love and fear the chat room. That’s out motto for the day. Hey, thank you so much Gina. Please...

Gina Smith
Give me off Wikipedia.

Leo Laporte
Don’t – don’t be a stranger. Be got to come up and visit us at the cottage and we want to do a lots more with you. Okay?

Gina Smith
Anytime. Now I don’t have a tiny baby anymore, so...

Leo Laporte
Thank you, Gina.

Gina Smith
...I’m able to do it. Thanks Leo. And it’s great to meet you guys. What a fantastic show. And an honour.

Leo Laporte
It is. It’s a great show. And it’s thanks to people like Dwight Silverman, a long time friend and the band at the TechBlog. If you go to chron – blogs.chron.com and /techbog, it is the place I go to find out what’s going on in the tech world. He’s a great writer and does a lot of great stuff with his [indiscernible] (107:05) and so forth. Dwight, it’s always great to have you on.

Dwight Silverman
Well and I love being on Leo and we will have you back on Technology Bytes, soon.

Leo Laporte
Please, please I love to do it. Shwood is – he is in the family.

Brian Brushwood
[indiscernible] (107:18) weirdo.

Leo Laporte
I don’t know.

Brian Brushwood
You don’t even know what to say.

Leo Laporte
No, no, you – remember the family. I just don’t know how to fits in the spiky hair, but I – someday I’ll find out.

Brian Brushwood
Well, it’s good because I got a XXL [indiscernible] (107:28) to hold it out there, it works out well.

Leo Laporte
You’re saying you have big one, I’ll get you a little one.

Brian Brushwood
No, I like the one [indiscernible] (107:34).

Leo Laporte
All right. All right. Shwood is – gosh he does so many things, Scam School.

Brian Brushwood
You can call on me on Twitter, that’s the only way to keep up with me.

Leo Laporte
And that is Shwood.

Brian Brushwood
Shwood, yeah.

Leo Laporte
Or follow him on his death watch after…

Brian Brushwood
afterlife.me.

Leo Laporte
Afterlife theme – no I am sorry, afterlife.me.

Brian Brushwood
We’ll put updates on there as well.

Leo Laporte
I am telling you, somebody has going to do us – look they’ve already got to hidetheboots website, I know there is going to be a start-up called afterlife…

Brian Brushwood
Well I just hoping everybody signs up as far as throwing money at us like every other start-up.

Leo Laporte
There you go.

Brian Brushwood
[ph] [indiscernible] cut it a pie (108:06).

Leo Laporte
I will be on Regis and Kelly on Tuesday, almost embarrassed to admit it.

Brian Brushwood
No, this is huge man.

Leo Laporte
No, no, I have done it for – I am doing it for 10 years.

Brian Brushwood
But – now do you fine like unfair ways to plug you TWiT network while you are on there or do you figure that the masses are lost cause…

Leo Laporte
It’s a total lost cause, I don’t even – I mean the people who watch Regis and Kelly and they are wonderful people, have no interest in what you just saw here today.

Brian Brushwood
But can’t you just say – can’t you say, in fact we have a list of all of these at twit.tv.

Leo Laporte
I could, but…

Brian Brushwood
And with that, this could be the gateway drug to get like the rest of Middle America in the podcasting.

Gina Smith
As if you’re sure like my mother-in-law.

Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don’t know…

Gina Smith
I mean literally my mother-in-law is the most loyal people ever.

Leo Laporte
People go – they go, they say, Leo is a nice boy.

Gina Smith
He knows so much about…

Leo Laporte
He knows so much. I don’t understand a word he’s saying, but he’s such a nice boy.

Brian Brushwood
I like his Russian accent.

Leo Laporte
Yes, I wish he do that hat thing more often.

Gina Smith
You so…

Leo Laporte
The last time I was on Regis and Kelly, they made me wear a lab coat.

Brian Brushwood
[indiscernible] (109:12).

Leo Laporte
Well that’s how bad it is. That’s how bad it is. But, no, I love doing it. And you know Regis and Kelly are great. And guess what I am going to – so first I am going to do this at CES gadget roundup, that will be Tuesday, the 18th, at – on the last segment, so probably the last three minutes of the show, I’ll be the one with the credits are going over my face as I talk real fast. But then which is fun and they’ve never done this before, I am going to stick around, we’re going to pre-tape a segment, I am going up to Regis’ office, and I am going to teach him how to use the Twitter.

Brian Brushwood
Oh that’s great.

Leo Laporte
So that will be fun.

Brian Brushwood
You will be – you’re going to midwife his birth into Twitter, this is huge.

Dwight Silverman
Regis doesn’t already use Twitter?

Leo Laporte
They have official Twitter account but Kelly does all the tweeting.

Brian Brushwood
No, this will be great.

Gina Smith
The folks over in network news are so clueless technologically I had to teach Peter Jennings how to use his email. He’s have a secretary…

Leo Laporte
Right.

Gina Smith
[indiscernible] (109:58) dictated it.

Leo Laporte
Right, exactly.

Gina Smith
So, I mean and it’s so like that.

Brian Brushwood
[ph] [indiscernible] totally look forth (110:02). Anyone Regis’ age and position could give a [indiscernible] (110:08) buttocks about what he tweets, like he will be authentic like…

Leo Laporte
He will be like crap my dad says.

Brian Brushwood
Yes, exactly. He will be like Michael Rucker. If you follow Michael Rucker on Twitter; he’s hilarious because it’s clearly him tweeting. You can tell when real celebrities are tweeting versus their PR department.

Leo Laporte
I am going to tell him that. I would say, we need you to be authentic…

Brian Brushwood
To be authentic.

Leo Laporte
…on the air.

Dwight Silverman
Right. Right.

Leo Laporte
It’s absolutely one of the things I am going to tell him. So that will be lot of fun. I hope you watch, that would be back next week with this WEEK in TECH. Don’t forget NSFW with Brian Brushwood. What night do you do that with…?

Brian Brushwood
Tuesday nights usually. I think we’re going to try to squeeze it on Wednesday night; we’re having a schedule conflict this week. But you definitely going to hangout live…

Leo Laporte
Oh you got to be there for the chat.

Brian Brushwood
…it’s part of – it’s – you know how it is. It’s like a concert.

Leo Laporte
Oh I know.

Brian Brushwood
You got to be there live.

Leo Laporte
You got to be there live. But you can watch it after the fact at twit.tv/nsfw. I am Leo Laporte, thank you for joining us. We’ll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can. And it’s good time to break because Gina is getting darker, darker.